Restaurant RAW
RAW is a 60-seat lifestyle restaurant which serves vibrant ‘bistronomy’, a new wave of cooking style born in Paris, offering experimental haute cuisine. The mission of RAW was to bring ‘The New Interpretation of Taiwanese Flavor’ to the table by highlighting beautiful Taiwanese seasonal produce through innovative food and drink.
Chef André Chiang's food is always presented with artistry providing a muse for WEIJENBERG to select colours and tones accordingly to keep the main dining area minimal. The desired aesthetic was to create a close proximity between customer and food – table and chairs with lighting that would almost shine on the dishes only. The experience of Andre’s food is intended to be intimate. This intimacy allowed us to use wood as our main medium in the restaurant in its pure state to encapsulate the customers within the wooden sculpture in a gentle manner. The tables each have a different shaped table top, to break the space and monotony further, preventing a clustered feel. It also creates a sense of variety as you can dine at RAW many times and never have the same seat or view.
The conversation between WEIJENBERG and Chef André Chiang started late 2013 to create a new restaurant within the culinary chic hub of Le Qun 3rd Road, Taipei. André’s gastronomic vivid imagination combined with WEIJENBERG’s artistic vision set both on a trajectory to create a restaurant that would reflect the visceral and primitive nature of its namesake ‘RAW’.
The restaurant design tells a parallel tale about how chef André’s food can be experienced. Diners step into the eatery across a wooden path entering a tranquil lounge area which gently transitions customers away from the bustling streets of Taipei. A soft angled, organically sculptured wooden structure greets guests, and as they move into the main restaurant, this moves with them, merging to form the centre piece of RAW surrounding the centralized dining area.
The central wooden sculpture which forms the kitchen space at the centre of RAW is its most defining feature. The wood itself was handcrafted by carpenters who assembled the structure piece by piece. This is visible as each section of the structure has several joints; large pieces have been assembled in blocks where sometimes a joint is still noticeable. The textured lines on the structure were left on purpose and planned digitally before they were cut so they aligned in the right direction and always matched. The entire project is made in Taiwan, from local Taiwanese Wood cut out of wooden blocks from techniques traditionally used in ship making. All details were precisely drawn out and discussed with local carpenters on site and in the factories. The long wine wall, containing storage units is almost 4.5m high and almost 18m long, made entirely with typical Taiwan louvers.
With RAW it was important for us not to create distinct partitions in the restaurant as we felt this ‘boxy’ approach would be restrictive for a highly creative chef. We made RAW intentionally interior borderless, yet we still needed to intertwine restaurant operations and functionality with design. This created a complex challenge as we had to articulate a geometry that needed to have a strong practical element to it. Most of the structures you see in the restaurant are purposeful with storage, a wine island and a large counter by the entrance that do not compromise the beauty of the design.
When at the dining area, customers are seated at tailor-made tables with lighting which creates a stage for the food, drawing customers in closer to the table and to each other creating an intimacy and peaceful haven.
WEIJENBERG has won 7 accolades to date for RAW and the firm's ethos of ‘Crafting the Traditional’, a modern yet classic take on design. Set to make an indelible mark on the world, Camiel Weijenberg, founder of WEIJENBERG, is fast earning a reputation for his uncompromising vision pushing the structural boundaries of material and design.
