Restaurant Layouts That Suck: The New Ten-01 on NW Couch
Posted By KyleyI attended an opening party for Ten 01 (1001 NW Couch - Website) last night. While the food samplings (I only ate the samples) were quite tasty, I hated being inside the building. It is yet another fatal attempt to be the exception to the phrase “form follows function”. In this case, it’s design and layout completely sucks.
The whole place felt like a multi-level mouse maze dipped in huge bucket of 70s bathroom decor. The huge lights hanging from the second story looked liked empty toilet paper tubes. The hallways were designed for anorexics, while you could drive a friggin’ Hummer up the hard to find stairway in the back. The most comfortable spot was hanging out by the on the balcony at the top of the stairs.
Portland Food and Drink wrote a glowing article and mentioned the large square footage and seating capabilities, which I’m sure are accurate (them guys are thorough) but size and chair counts are not synonymous with comfortable atmosphere. They did touch upon the usage of recycled materials whenever possible souch as the recycled walnut used in the downstairs bar construction and all of the other “sustainable” usual suspects.
While the crowd was sizeable, I can’t blame the crampedness on the attendees alone. When you run into dead ends and narrow canals at every turn, one tends to feel trapped.
But hey, the food was good and the people were pretty, so it’s worth checking out on that tip.
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One Response to “Restaurant Layouts That Suck: The New Ten-01 on NW Couch”
1 Classy Night on the Town » Portland Interior Design Blog 17 December 2006 @ 11:29 pm
[…] Afterwards, my friend and I meandered to Ten 01, made infamous to me in a rant by Kyle. I agree with him, it’s pretty cramped, especially around the bar. Servers and customers alike kept bumping into purses on the floor or stepping on coats hung off chairs. But I appreciated the attempt to make lots of little nooks and crannies, where my friend and I could feel like we had staked out our own portion of the restaurant. As you come through the door of the restaurant, there is a table partitioned off on three and a half sides to your left. It acts like a semi-private dining room, but it looks somewhat like a shower stall. I don’t think I hated the layout as much as Kyle, despite making fun of a few things. I had a great meal there and loved being able to spy up into the glowing open upper balcony from the bar. I do agree that the long tube lights were a bad choice. While he says they look like empty toilet paper tubes, I disagree. I’m thinking half-full paper towl rolls. They have the dimpling and everything. […]
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