Kris Moran had five months to source props for Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, including three to prep. “When you’re on set, filming, it runs around $200,000 per day. You have to be prepared or everything stops,” says the set designer.
And for the interiors of the Bombay Bread Bar restaurant? One week.
The Bombay Bread Bar is the new incarnation of Indian restaurant Paowalla in New York’s SoHo and is the most recent example of a thoroughly modern restaurant tailor-made for the Instagram generation. When merely turning up the lights won’t do, restaurateurs are enlisting experts from stage and screen to make dining spaces that double as photogenic lifestyle moments.
Fashion haunts such as Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, which has locations in New York, Chicago, and Paris and was co-designed by Lauren, have known this for years, but the trend has gone Hollywood. At the Bombay Bread Bar, what was once a buttoned-up, monochromatic space is now a vibrant, colorful room, with a giant tiger mural animating the bread oven and a curtain of yellow flowers at the door.
The Wes Anderson Restaurant
“I wanted Paowalla to be fun and energetic, and I wasn’t succeeding,” says chef Floyd Cardoz. More important, he was doing only half the business he wanted to. Cardoz considered closing, but his friend Will Guidara, co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, encouraged him to hire Moran, whose work included The Darjeerling Limited, which featured a highly stylized view of India.
Paowalla’s transformation to the Bombay Bread Bar would be notable under most circumstances, but that it happened in a week—the amount of time it takes most restaurateurs to settle on a paint color—is astonishing.
It’s also extremely cost-effective. Moran hung the homemade, lotus-printed paper on the walls herself, added blue walls (“straight from the Wes Anderson color palate”), and put bright oil cloths on tables. A two-day painting project was done overnight. Costs clocked in around $70,000; a typical New York restaurant build-out can easily hit, and surpass, $1 million.