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A Sleekly Smoked-Out Version On Hong Kong’s ‘Rhoda’ For Yaletown

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Restaurant Porn is a regular column of daydreams presented as a means to introduce Vancouver diners and designers to concepts, looks, and fully-formed ideas that they might draw an inkling of inspiration from. We do our best to pair the foreign rooms with local addresses so as to let everyone in on the daydream.

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(via) Chef tastes and techniques are typically left out of the restaurant design process, but that wasn’t the case at Rhoda, a sophisticated restaurant in Hong Kong Island’s Sai Ying Pun neighbourhood. Designed by Joyce Wang Studio, the eatery follows the culinary fixations of the chef, Nate Green, who loves to smoke and char his ingredients. Homage is paid to these penchants through burned wood cladding on the walls and columns (Wang achieved the effect using a Japanese method of wood preservation called shou sugi ban), the hot-branding of rose emblems into the table tops and the use of recycled, smoked-out washing machine drums in a huge chandelier (these spent drums tie back to the theme on account of their local domestic use as makeshift BBQs). Green is also something of a barbershop/tattoo fetishist, and these tastes are on equal display in a six seat alcove that comes complete with shaving brushes attached to copper piping, tattoo designs, and a “hairy” textured concrete wall (achieved by pushing concrete through chicken wire). Possibly the coolest feature, however, is Rhoda’s horizontally sliding garage doors made of lattice-perforated raw steel, opening up to the sidewalk in dramatic fashion. We’d take a version of it close to Blue Water Cafe on the 1000 block of Hamilton St. in the heart of Yaletown.

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Photographs by Dennis Lo & Lit Ma.

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