At L˜ARIA, that ambition is directed at dinner. Chef Massimiliano Blasone’s menu – refined Italian cuisine with Japanese inflections, rooted in the slow food principles of small Italian producers, with lake-caught fish – already asks diners to attend to provenance and craft. The design, now, makes the same request of the room itself. The two become complicit in the insistence on presence, on noticing, on the kind of close attention that turns a meal into a core memory, a feeling.
It would be easy to be cynical about this and to argue that architecture cannot change how food tastes, that ambiance is just a more expensive word for atmosphere, that Herzog & de Meuron is, at some level, lending its considerable prestige to a very nice hotel restaurant on a very beautiful lake. And perhaps that’s true. But it somewhat misses the point. What great design has always revealed, and what the best restaurants understand, is that eating is never just about food. It is about time – the particular quality of an hour, the way light moves across a table, the sense that you are, for once, exactly where you should be. In L˜ARIA, Herzog & de Meuron has done what it has always done: made a room in which the world seems to briefly slow down and come into focus. Whether that actually changes how the risotto tastes is perhaps a question only diners can answer. But they will notice the dish through a different lens. And in the end, noticing is what Herzog & de Meuron has always asked of us.
