‘Nobody walks in here and doesn’t comment on the lights,’ says Jason Atherton, standing in the downstairs private dining room of his new restaurant, Row on 5, which is nestled amid the silk ties and lapel rolls of Savile Row. It only opened in November and has already won a Michelin star, echoing the success of its cousin in Dubai, Row on 45, which won two stars within eight months.
You do not become Jason Atherton – 16 restaurants worldwide, endless stars and prizes, countless high-end brand partnerships, occasional HR controversy – without an eye for detail. Row on 5 is a temple to sourcing the best that money can buy, from the glassware to the cutlery to the turbot.
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For the lighting, Atherton turned to German illumination specialist Occhio. In the 26 years since it was founded, Occhio has gone from darling of the design world to global luxury light powerhouse. Above us, three of its signature Mito sospeso models – LED rings suspended from the ceiling – are lowered silently by what the Occhio website calls an ‘ingenious roll-up mechanism’.
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Watching the golden rings descend, I am briefly reminded of the London Olympics opening ceremony. But when I look back to the table, my fellow diners’ faces are suddenly warm, and the event acquires a new intimacy as waiters pour champagne and present four snacks of caviar, tuna belly and langoustine. The reflection of the rings shimmers in the glassware.
We are taken upstairs for the main event, where more Mito pendants descend to illuminate our meal. The staircase is decorated with a large installation of Occhio’s signature designs, the Luna, in which a small sphere glows within a larger sphere. Helen Neumann, Occhio’s director of lighting design, explains the importance of warmth.
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‘The lights coming down is a welcoming gesture,’ she explains. ‘You sit down, the light is coming to you. The warmth is embracing you as a guest.’
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‘When you’re thinking about how you feel in a space, your skin is the best indicator for your brain to understand whether it’s a healthy environment or not,’ Neumann adds.
‘Colour temperature plays an important role. If your skin looks greyish, you will not say the light is bad, but you feel it is bad. When you bring the lights down, you don’t have shadows and you reflect the warm, healthy tones.’
Like any of the other thousand details that add up to a great restaurant experience, then, beautiful lighting is mostly something the customer appreciates without realising. They feel relaxed, intimate, comfortable. They enjoy the meal and book again, but they may not know why.
Sometimes they do, though. One diner was so impressed by the lighting that he took more drastic action. ‘One of our regulars was doing up his house,’ Atherton says. ‘He had already started his lights, but he liked ours so much that he took them all out and put these in instead.’
It’s not only that this is the best lighting for a restaurant; the restaurant is the best showroom for the lights, too.
This letter first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 95. Click here to subscribe
