Unhappy eaters

Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams wonders why restaurants look the way they do

Kepler's law of restaurants states that the period of the decorative style of a place is in inverse proportion to its distance from the centre. The centre of the British system lies somewhere near the Thames in the City of London, marked, let's say, by the Monument, since this already commemorates the site of a restaurant that was once very hot indeed. So in Clerkenwell and Bermondsey, close to the centre, it's 1999. Decor is spare - not minimal, exactly (that would be affected), but "honest". You are expected to be happy with bare tables and paper napkins. Walls are white, glass expansive, structure skeletal. One orbit out, a year or two back in time. In Islington, restaurant walls are perhaps distressed, perhaps washed in ethnic colour. In Kensington and Hampstead and Blackheath, traditional comforts such as table cloths begin to appear. By the time you reach the M25, they probably still think it's smart to appear French. There are small perturbations to the overall system, of course - Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow - but the law holds to a first approximation.

Why should there be this constant radiation from the centre, so that to visit a restaurant in Devon or Yorkshire is like detecting the remnants of some culinary big bang (to mix my cosmological metaphors)? What is the source of this energy?

The exhibition Eating Design makes no overt effort to investigate this puzzle. It is not an intellectually high-flown undertaking, more a showcasing of wares by architects, a companion piece to earlier shows called Living Design and Working Design on homes and offices. Put on by the London region of the Royal Institute of British Architects, it is unapologetically metropolitan. It focuses, in other words, on the proverbial first three minutes after the big bang.

But Simon Foxell, one of the exhibition's architect-curators, is surprisingly bluff. "The English have never been that happy eating out," he says. "They probably need to be reassured in some way by the environment they are in." The revealing thing here is the presumption that people's design sense is more developed than their palate. Perhaps people will begin to visit restaurants as a way of trying out, for a couple of hours, various potential home-decor options. Perhaps it's what happens already. Foxell thinks it is an inversion of the sensibility that applied when we used to relax in pubs that were ornamented with a vulgarity we could never permit ourselves at home. It can only be a matter of time before some enterprising television production company conflates two of the most over-exposed genres of programme - cookery and home make-overs - to come up with a format where contestants must both design and cook. Loyd Grossman may already have done it. Perhaps it's on Channel 5.

As architectural jobs, restaurants have all the needs of far larger projects - the acoustics of theatres, the lighting of exhibition halls, the hygiene of hospitals, the toughness of factories - but without the budget of any of them. Most restaurants are one-offs, so mistakes tend to get repeated. Even getting the size of tables and plates right is apparently beyond some. The design and scripting of menus is a separate art in its own right.

The temptation is for the architect or, in more modest projects, the interior designer to see a restaurant as a publicity vehicle. Any restaurant is likely to be pictured and written about in the press more than, say, a shop or a house. They are a traditional stepping stone for some architects. Rick Mather (the Zens), Julyan Wickham (Fish!) and the famous minimalist John Pawson all made their names in part with restaurants. Things have not attained the giddy heights in America during the Reagan boom when the architect became the main draw to new restaurants in cities such as Los Angeles.

None of this concerns food at all, which is why this discussion would be irrelevant in France and Italy (but not, perhaps, Barcelona or Berlin). In the English-speaking world, it is theatre that takes the place of guiltless sensuality and easy conviviality. We do not live the reality, we can only act our part. In the round of our restaurants, the class war of ordering, the uncertainty of attracting a waiter, the special frisson of complaining, all set off unpredictable trajectories. The sets look great, but nobody quite knows their lines. Our restaurants are like our supermarkets. Because we do not know what to look for, they anaesthetise us with the presentation, and we happily pay for the treatment. In both cases, designers cream off their share of the mark-up. Ben Fereday, the co-curator of Eating Design, sounds like a retail consultant when he says: "It's almost like another hors d'oeuvre, design. It creates another level of anticipation."

If this is so, if design encodes cuisine in this way, one is entitled to ask what can reliably be deduced about the food - maybe that should be the "eating experience" - from an initial glimpse of the architecture. Fereday merely concludes: "If the design is fresh, new and trying in some way, you can bet the food is going to be trying, too." And, you know what, I think you can.

"Eating Design" is at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1 until 3 October

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