![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Culinary director Jeremy Kittelson delivers a dinner menu of Pan-Mediterranean tapas that travels with confidence from the patatas bravas of Spain to Israeli-style spiced lamb ribs. But it’s not all looks at El Five-there’s substance below the surface. No other penthouse perch in Denver is plastered with vintage Middle Eastern movie posters and glittering mirrors, nor can you find the same wraparound views of the Mile High City skyline and the Rocky Mountains elsewhere. “The same restaurant can live differently each time you come.El Five, the fifth brand in the eclectic Edible Beats empire (which also includes Linger, Root Down, Vital Root, and Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox), is one sexy restaurant. “We go in restaurants all the time where they miss the opportunity, and there’s a sameness to the experience,” Stephenson says. The good news for everyone who happens now upon this Highland parking lot, vestibule, and elevator, and then waits for the fifth floor and a table at the top, is that the show will have just started, or at the very least it will be far from over yet. “Usually he doesn’t reveal what the menu is or necessarily what his concept is to us.” Hard to say, then, if El Five’s food and drinks dictated its design, or if the decor brought about a final menu direction. It brought this history in that the building didn’t have, and that’s when really everything coalesced.”Ĭucci didn’t come to Stephenson, Davis, and Forget with “a linear vision” or even a “vision up-front,” Davis adds. “The soul of El Five came from Justin’s discovery of these old, Middle Eastern billboards. “The hardest spaces for us to design are the ones that don’t have a soul yet, they’re just an empty, vacant shell,” Stephenson says. Their images allude to a Humphrey Bogart era within Arab cinema, all sultry and dramatic, with buxom (dyed) blondes, strong angular men, and passion-inflected speech bubbles. They’re midcentury Egyptian reprints, falling in line with the loose “tapas de Gibraltar” food description. Indeed, El Five’s is the type of space that would best be captured on film, in a single tracking shot that slinks around the many corners of the restaurant.Īnd while the architects tried to avoid a “thematic” feeling here, film could be one theme that carries through, captured in El Five’s moving layout, beyond the picture windows, and across the walls on vintage movie posters. ![]() He, Davis, and Cucci traveled to Las Vegas and New York to check out the latest restaurant layouts, and they brought back with them this idea for a performative kitchen and dining room. “Justin wanted to see a sense of performance,” Stephenson says. They’re positioned almost in conversation with the bar, a loud and raucous corner that’s packed first just after opening. Meanwhile, two cooks are always exposed at work inside a wide-open counter at the center of the dining area. They can happen upon servers huddled at the dishwashing station or peek in on the back-kitchen chefs. On their way into the restaurant, to the bathrooms, or back to their tables, diners can encounter these “intentional misalignments” firsthand, in an area between the traditional front and back of house. “And it’s magnetic to people even though they have no idea where it’s coming from.” On and on it went like this: “Some tension is sort of revealed in the design,” Stephenson says now. He would come to the architects with “obsessive collections of materials and finishes.” They would respond with clean, modern lines and minimal decoration. Together with project lead Brent Forget, they had to tell Cucci yes or no when he bought 3,000 mirrors on eBay, for example. Cucci and the Boss team went back and forth in a process that Stephenson and partner Chris Davis say included more “nos” than most of their other work. ![]()
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