Williamsburg Restaurant Renovation

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When chef Tim Meyers, formerly of Eleven Madison Park, Blanca, Glasserie, and others, sought to open his farm-to-table restaurant in Williamsburg, he turned to Mammoth’s commercial renovation team and tasked them with transforming a former fast-casual Chinese restaurant into an intimate dining experience that reflects the spirit of the food, engages the senses, and captures the bucolic essence of Upstate New York, his place of origin, with a contemporary twist. To achieve this thoughtful restaurant renovation Mammoth acted as both the design-lead and also the general contractor. We researched 19th-century restaurants before globalization and art ranging from Andrew Wyeth to Dutch still-lifes and incorporated these references with local materials like brick, aluminum, and oak. Through carefully selecting materials and lighting, Mammoth created a space that exudes softness and intimacy.

In designing Field Guide, Meyers asked the Mammoth team to consider Wyeth’s paintings. Mammoth took note of his color palette, particularly the muted tones and the strategic use of black. We superimposed this color palette onto a restaurant construction project: a task that seemed to us to be in line with the prosaic subject matter of Wyeth’s work. We also observed how Wyeth manipulated light and shadow, allowing uneven lighting to establish particular moods, and allowed darkness, as well as light influence our restaurant design. These elements from his paintings influenced the restaurant's color palette and overall tone. The floor features a muted yellow, while the walls present a modern interpretation of traditional wainscoting, utilizing aluminum channels and silver leaf instead of wood paneling to ground the space in contemporary Brooklyn.

A surprising influence on the lighting design was Meyers’s choice to use tablecloths, diverging from the typical rustic aesthetic of farm-to-table restaurants. This element influenced our interior design choices, specifically as it related to the lighting: we sought inspiration from candlelight, choosing to create a modern take on single flame levitating at each tabletop. We sourced A Tube Pendant Lights by Lodes, they carved out intimate areas within the restaurant reminiscent of a candlelight experience without taking up valuable space. This serene lighting casts a dream-light ambiance on the space as a whole. The traffic flow has an ephemeral quality, with bodies bodies floating through the room, illuminated by faux-candlelight. Additional lighting sources include sconces designed by and the large windows adorning the front of the restaurant. 

We sought to push the boundaries of traditional restaurant design with the design of a custom “fired” limestone and hand-sculpted acrylic bar. Seeking a space to experiment creatively, the bar draws inspiration from Hiroshi Sugimoto's sculpture, Appropriate Proportion, which Grinshpun encountered nearly 20 years ago as an architecture student visiting Japan. She was captivated by how light reflected off the glass stairs into the rough stone below. The interior design — as a whole — draws inspiration from both old and new. The bar employs hand-sculpted acrylic to achieve a similar physical expression, where the rippled edge reflects light onto Normann Copenhagen barstools made from hemp. It also appears as a single step from the sculpture, leading the eye toward a large mural created by Oliver Jevremov, a local photographer sitting above custom millwork we designed and built to hold barware and bottles. Inspired by Dutch still-life, the mural showcases objects found around Williamsburg paired with fruit, reinterpreting traditional styles with a 21st-century twist. While a need to comply with building codes inspired a section of lower seating, creating two distinct geometries, side by side: table height, and bar height.

Adjacent to the bar, the seating area features a mix of square two-tops and round four-tops to accommodate various party sizes. Mammoth repurposed the banquettes from the Chinese restaurant, replacing the old fabric with beige velvet reducing the need for additional custom millwork. Mammoth sourced additional seating from Design Within Reach, choosing a chair whose designs pay homage to Upstate New York.

We worked with the client on both the architecture, interior design, décor and acted as his general contractor. We also helped him steer his project scope towards a project budget that was in line with his goals. For this reason, we sought to make the commercial kitchen functional, yet manageable, from a budgetary and compliance point of view. We collaborated with a kitchen designer to design a fully functioning fully electric commercial kitchen, alleviating the need for more traditional restaurant architect or extensive mechanical drawings. A lack of an open flame in the kitchen allowed us to avoid the management of more stringent building codes, and push the open date towards our client’s goal.

Restaurant build-outs are a race against the clock, and our project management team completed construction, coordinated the subcontractors and sourced all of the decor and finishing elements in four months. Our restaurant construction services benefit from a design-build model where both the design team and construction teams are working in unison to meet faster-paced timelines common in the industry.

The result is a space representing an intersection of past and future, memory and reality. It embodies a blend of formal and casual contradictions—unfussy and relaxed—that defines a modern approach to fine dining.