5 Most Popular Restaurant and Bar Projects of 2016

As the year draws to a close, we're highlighting the most popular articles on InteriorDesign.net. Check out our roundup of the top restaurant/bar stories we've published in 2016, and view our most popular hotels, offices, and retail projects.

5. Rene Gonzalez Designs an Unforgettable Indoor-Outdoor Venue for Plant Food + Wine in Miami

For Plant Food + Wine's Miami outpost, architect Rene Gonzalez says he focused on “a seamless interface between indoor and outdoor.” Here’s how he made the connection. Figuratively, it comes courtesy of the ambiguity created by the gardens’ reflections in the bronzed mirror strips on the accordion-pleated sidewalls. On a more literal level, the front wall disappears entirely when its glass panels fold away.

4. 10 Global Restaurants Deliver __design à la Carte

Our menu of unexpected dining options.

3. Hot New Restaurant Designs From Hong Kong to Mexico City

Designers around the globe serve up clever concepts.

2. Architectural Innovation Comes to the Remote Azores with Fernando Coelho and Paulo Lobo's Cella Bar

The Azores are unlikely enough as geological formations go, with nine islands sprinkled in the Atlantic Ocean off the Iberian peninsula. Christopher Columbus sailed there on his way back from the New World to Spain, and the archipelago is now about a two-hour flight from Lisbon. So a long-abandoned storehouse for wine on the coast of Pico Island is a truly unlikely hot spot for cosmopolitan travelers. But that’s precisely the scenario of Cella Bar, one of several collaborations between FCC Architecture and Paulo Lobo Interior Design.

1. Stripes Enliven Berlin's Bar Zentral Designed by Hidden Fortress

As longtime bartenders at a Berlin institution, the Green Door, Torsten Bender and Sebastian Mathow knew that several of its hippest competitors had been designed by the same small firm, Hidden Fortress. So when Bender and Mathow decided to open their own place, they immediately asked the firm’s three partners, Jan Maley, Björn Meier, and Ingo Strobel, to help. The partners, in turn, enlisted frequent collaborator CollignonArchitektur. “We requested a bar without an obvious concept,” Bender says. “People should come in, order a drink, and only then start noticing unusual details.” And there are plenty at Bar Zentral, especially considering that it consists of just 390 square feet tucked under a brick arch of the S-Bahn rail viaduct.