In Willo Perron’s pop-up restaurant for Matter and Shape, neither the atmosphere nor the aftertaste (and a great one, at that) was afterthought.

Key features

We eat with our eyes. At least, that’s what the We Are Ona pop-up in the Jardin des Tuileries for Matter and Shape would have you believe. Designer Willo Perron dreamt up a surrealist spectacle for the second edition of the Parisian design salon, channelling the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and paying homage to modernism in its earliest guises.  

Slick, shiny, curvy. The space felt at once timeless and futuristic. Large, circular tables were draped in crisp, white linen, with nothing but delicate glasses and chromatic tableware for decoration. Arched metal serving pieces echoed the soft contours of Flos’s silver space-age pendants; the crescents return in playful menu typography and the arms of oblong mirrors – part of Perron’s collection for Swedish retailer No Ga – encircling the space. The glossy, stripped back interior demands attention without ornamentation, just as Le Corbusier and Melnikov’s pavilions had in the progenitive 1925 fair. 

The team behind the culinary programming paid no heed to the old adage: one mustn’t play with one's food. Instead, culinary director Luca Pronzato and chef Imogen Kwok embraced Perron’s vision and transformed the act of consumption into a celebration of form and an ode to materiality. 'My approach to presentation is deeply rooted in minimalism but never at the expense of warmth or pleasure. I believe in stripping things back to their essential elements while maintaining a sense of monumentality. Space, to me, is as much about what is left unsaid as what is present,' Kwok says. Whenever a project is percolating, she considers 'how materials, surfaces and movement shape the perception of food and the environment around it'.

FRAME's take

Going out for dinner is no longer just about the food – though deliciousness, too, is paramount. Traditional restaurants and cafés are still relevant, certainly, but a riptide of culinary have elevated dining beyond mere gustatory pleasure.  

Designers like Helis Heiter use food as a medium to probe existing systems and their potential progress, while chefs like Kwok and Pronzato work hand-in-hand with design industry innovators like Willo Perron and FLOS to craft immersive, multisensory experiences. Hospitality entrepreneurs like Studiø 27’s Antoine Bertin and Nathan Gullentops reshape the boundaries of gastronomy by giving equal weight to aromatics and ambience and treating dining as a holistic, synesthetic endeavour. Perron’s We Are Ona pop-up restaurant indicated that perhaps spatial design is beginning to extend to what’s on the plate, not simply what’s around it. Food becomes figurative and cooking choreography.