0.5 Studio designs Smokers restaurant in Prague

Prague's 7th district was an industrial neighborhood until the nineties; in the meantime - unsurprisingly - Holešovice has turned into a hipster district. To ensure that this clientele can also eat in a manner befitting their status, a pair of restaurateurs opened an American-inspired smoker bistro. The design straddles the look of a spartan paper plate snack bar and the luxury of really good, authentic American food.

by Barbara Hallmann, 02.06.2020

Prague's new hipster neighborhood Holešovice plays with its industrial past: here, expensive loft apartments now sit next to creative labs and fashion start-ups, international restaurants next to a center for contemporary art and the headquarters of internationally active companies. Only a few vacant factory buildings or huge gaps between buildings remain as reminders of what used to dominate everyday life there: Holešovice, incorporated only about 130 years ago, was an industrial suburb until a few years ago. The slaughterhouse and the power plant were located here, along with many metal-processing plants. Since 1990, the neighborhood has been transforming, and many office spaces have sprung up. And at the end of 2019, Prague restaurateur couple Tomáš Oujezdský and Silvie Jackson opened the self-service bistro Big Smokers. The design was the responsibility of 0.5 Studio, run by Pavel Nový and Vít Svoboda. For them, the task was to bring the atmosphere of a typical American restaurant somewhere along the highway to the still quite spacious Holešovice, without unnecessary pathos and artificial-looking decorative elements.

America at the Vltava
In order to achieve a feeling of America at the Vltava, the principle of self-service is literally staged. Self-service in the Czech Republic is traditionally rare, and if it is, it is only found in canteens and cheap buffet restaurants. From the Czech point of view, the principle does not directly fit with high-quality and higher-priced food. And so the architects themselves call their restaurant a kind of "picnic bistro. Guests order and pay at the counter; they also get their sandwich or pulled pork with pickled vegetables right there - and then balance everything on their tray to the table. On their way there, they get a glimpse of the busy kitchen and thus of the entire process: everyone can watch how raw products are turned into finished dishes. The centerpiece of the staging is the large smoker. Meat and vegetables are smoked at low temperatures in the black metal cabinet - over wood, of course, which is stacked up in the passageway between the counter area and the two rear guest areas to provide authenticity.

Mischievous design
The furniture was also designed by 0.5 Studio: the bar tables, the snack sets made of wood and picnic tables inspired by American models, made of bent steel tube. Two paintings by Russian-Czech artist Alexey Klyuykov are the only decorative elements, along with the restaurant's merchandising shirts and caps and a string of lights; thanks to their sheer size and striking design language, they almost look like billboards. And so the design mixes international inspiration with a new Czech self-confidence - analogous to everything on the plate here: American food culture meets tart beer specialties from small Czech breweries. At the same time, the architects have succeeded in taking the principle even further with a dose of Bohemian roguishness: The hard, perhaps somewhat bare-looking surfaces in various shades of green and a dark red not only contrast the often plush interiors of traditional Prague cafés. In the end, the Big Smokers seems like a kind of American UFO that also reconciles Holešovice with its industrial past. After all, the sparseness of the space ultimately reminds us a bit of the charm of a factory cafeteria.

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