TABLESIDE Blurring the line between dining, art and

PALETTE:

OLD FRAME, NEW PICTURE

A former S.F. dining hot spot is revived with bold colors — and a concept that blurs the lines between dining, art and shopping.

TRAILERS OFTEN INDICATE how good a movie will be, and perhaps chef/restaurateur Peter Hemsley’s experimental Palette restaurant/gallery/store that opened last spring in San Francisco’s SoMa district is just such a prelude to a more permanent Palette due to open in 2020.

San Francisco/New York architect Cass Calder Smith is designing the 35-year-old Hemsley’s upcoming restaurant that offersa mix of food-related experiences, but the project has encountered construction delays. Impatient to get started, Hemsley found a ready-to-go placeholder — a 1910 barrel-vaulted space that coincidentally had housed Smith’s very firsteatery project: chef Reed Hearon’s 1993 restaurant LuLu.

Shuttered in 2017 after a 24-year run, LuLu was groundbreaking — communal tables and family-style dining, commonplace today, were pioneered here. Hemsley found the defunct restaurant’s large open-plan space, with a brick-covered wood-burning oven and rotisserie in its center, well preserved. A long bar on the east side was intact. The main room opened to two additional dining wings — a cafe on the west side and a private dining room with a dedicated kitchen on the east side. The setup was perfect for Palette’s plan: an artisanal goods store in the west wing, a restaurant in the middle, and a gallery next to that. “It’s always a little weird remodeling your own project, but this was also my firstrestaurant,” says Smith, who’s designed many restaurants on both U.S. coasts. “But I thought about what Peter was trying to do. It wasn’t a second run for LuLu, but a food arts venue.”

Smith is no stranger to art. He is involved with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, where he created studios, and has been on SFMOMA’s architecture and design accessions committee.

He quickly introduced a showy translucent pivot door, made by Travis Hayes of wood and ribbed acrylic sheathing, as a piece of kinetic sculpture between the restaurant and the eastside gallery, which is now painted white. Th west-side cafe-turned-store has a new kiln for firing ceramics.

In form and function, the restaurant did not have to change much, but LuLu’s Mediterranean colors, which would have been fine for a lunch

Above: A wood-and-ribbed-acrylic pivot door designed by Cass Calder Smith for Palette’s art gallery. Left: Palette’s main dining room, created originally for Restaurant LuLu, is vivified with olor. Sturdy new fold-up tables also serve as fashion show runways.

crowd, had to give way for younger diners who prefer “a more nighttime vibe,” Smith says.

He painted the walls with various hues of dark blue that bleed into each other and up into the bare wood of the vaulted ceiling like a Rothko painting.

Flexibility for an exhibition/fashion-show venue and tech parties was also required, so although some of LuLu’s original upholstered corner banquettes remain, Smith and project architect Joseph Benveniste removed a section of the railing wall around the slightly sunken dining pit that might impede the flw of models or performers. A three-way community table built by Arnold and Egan around an immovable central column is fitted with hinges and pulleys so it can be lifted out of the way like a three-pronged drawbridge, lowered for dining and even linked with regular tables to form a continuous raised ramp for fashion shows or performances. Black “Masters” dining chairs designed by Philippe Starck and Eugeni Quitllet for Kartell are another easy-to-move lightweight component.

Thebar top is enhanced with a patchwork of diffeent-colored stone slabs, and although the oven and rotisserie remain untouched, they are wrapped in polished stainless steel that

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On the left of the dining pit, a lounge area is fittedwith informal blue-painted plywood bleachers topped with exotic, colorful cushions that complement a large floralmural by Velia de Iuliis on the west wall. Hemsley continues to add eclectic artwork by locals.

If all this seems like an unlikely mise-en-scène for Hemsley, a Midwesterner with a history/ political science degree who trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu and worked under worldclass chefs in Paris and as a sous chef at San Francisco’s Quince, it isn’t.

“I drew as a young child,” he reveals, and he is still passionate about art and artists. Hence, he wants Palette to be — like the Mission District’s innovative Foreign Cinema — a locus for both art and dining. In its startup food menu, Palette’s cooking, sometimes inflected with ingredients Hemsley used at Quince, is ultimately casual and varies during the day or for special prix fixe dining/wine events on Saturdays.

Also, already within a few months, Palette’s concept has grown to include a maker space within the store because, while researching historical barbecue and croissant recipes as a hobby, Hemsley began drawing again; his colored-pencil and watercolor illustrations of recipe ingredients appear on Palette’s plates, fired in the store. He recalls an instance at Quince when they ran out of plates; at Palette, that may never happen. In fact, when dishes break, they are reconstituted into new ones to replenish the supply. Dishes here are also for sale, and diners or walk-ins can purchase exclusive pieces and dinnerware by other local makers, including Oakland’s Trainhole Studios and Berkeley’s Rocket Glass Works, which makes amoeba-shaped clear glass vases.

For Hemsley, though, food here is paramount. Even in the gallery’s frequent painting and mixed-media sculpture shows, the works “are always inspired by food,” he says. “It is a circular concept.” n

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As usual, they communicated digitally and by videoconference and “cross-utilized technology and each other’s teams,” Ro says. When Marin’s complex design review process made it seem that new theater tenants might not materialize, they decided to complete the officloft and leave the lower level undeveloped for a tenant to customize later. “Thisproject is now just four walls and a roof,” Rockett says wryly.

But of course it is more than that. Even if the building may never again contain a movie house, it will have an anchoring street presence, fit “for any lively mixed-use tenant,” he says.

Such flexbility makes sense. Th building has been many things before and will morph again. It began life as a Spanish Colonial Revival–style auto livery/garage and later became a venue for boxing matches, a single-screen cinema and, after 1992, a three-screen Cinemark theater with a lobby entrance on Caledonia. When it closed in 2016, “locals really missed that ‘public’ space,” Rockett says.

Because Sausalito is a former fishing village and a boat-builder had also used the top floo during the 1940s, the architects chose a nautical theme. The stripped the interior down to studs, and now the building’s remarkable heavy-timbered trusses holding up its gable roof — like the spars for a ship’s rigging — are revealed in the office space upstairs. Outside, vertical strips of rough-sawn cedar cladding are intended to echo a shipbuilder’s scaffolding.To take advantage of bay views, the designers eliminated sections of vertical screening at the officlevel and added a horizontal band of “lookout” windows for a belvedere.

“Thecedar skin of the building is its soul,” Ro says — expensive to execute, but then again it’s hard to value-engineer a hand-built see-through screen.

The building they will unveil in early 2020 won’t be historicist but crisply modern, expressing its materiality like the work of their heroes Peter Zumthor and Le Corbusier, whose Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard Rockett knows well. The downstairs “clean slate” ideally will hold music or movie-related tenants. “I want it to be an entertainment and event space with a restaurant,” To says. “A gathering place for the community.” Rockett, who has worked on many wineries in the past, secretly hopes for a brewery or winery with a local culinary component. “Thepossibilities are endless,” he says. n