I Don't Design Spaces, I Design Portraits: Adam Tihany on Emotion, Control and Turning His Back on Technology

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Adam Tihany, the designer who coined the title Restaurant Designer in the United States and has spent a career building the rooms behind chefs such as Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud, alongside hotels like The Breakers and the Beverly Hills Hotel and a long line of cruise ships. At a summit built around technology and humanity, Tihany was the counter-voice, and he made no effort to hide which side he is on. The full conversation is available to watch below.

Emotion comes from control

Simone opened by asking when design creates real emotion and when it becomes expensive decoration. Tihany enjoyed the question and gave a clean answer: decoration is what you put into a room, and emotion is what the room draws out of you.

For restaurants, that emotion comes from control. If you can control what the customer sees, how they move through the space and the views they get, you can tell a story. He compares it to a film. Emotion builds through a progression rather than a single moment, because a single moment is a quick wow and then it is gone. You start with something that makes people curious and you build, like a novelist, towards a climax. In a restaurant the climax is the meal, which a guest may look at across the room for half an hour before it arrives. The art of design, in his telling, is the art of storytelling.

The chef is the subject

This is where Tihany set out the idea that runs through his work. He does not design spaces, he said, he designs portraits of his clients. He thinks of himself as a portrait artist, and the work is not about him. It is about the chef's personality, their ego, who they are. The more established and sure of themselves the chef is, the better the portrait, because the key elements are easier to read. The client, as Simone put it, is the canvas, and the chef's history goes into the background of the painting.

Every restaurateur dreams of a timeless place, one that still feels right twenty or thirty years on and becomes a classic. Tihany treats that as a lofty and elusive goal, and he leaves room for it on purpose. A good portrait holds space for the parts of the story that have not happened yet.

The method is unusual. He starts with a drink and what he calls a deep psychological dive into where the chef comes from and where they want to go. Chefs rarely speak the language of design, he said, but they can cook, so he asks them to cook the dishes the new restaurant will serve. He looks at the food, steps back, and imagines the room that belongs around it. Having run restaurants himself for twenty-three years, he reckons he speaks both languages, and he keeps returning to the same word for what he is really doing: control.

Two opposite restaurants, a month apart

He told one story to make the point. Years ago he designed two flagship restaurants in New York at the same time, for two operators who could not have been more different, and they opened about a month apart.

One was Sirio Maccioni, the Italian from Montecatini who owned Le Cirque, then one of the most famous restaurants in the city. Tihany built him an ornate palace, a kind of circus, because Maccioni was a ringmaster and, in Tihany's words, one of the great maître d's America ever had. His whole gift was making people happy. He also handed Tihany a line he still repeats: the customer is not always right, but he is always the customer. The other was Jean-Georges, then a young, intense, minimalist chef, whose flagship at Columbus Circle was designed so that he looked completely at home standing in it, as though the room had been built around him.

The two places looked nothing alike. When the New York Times interviewed Tihany at the time, the first question was what drugs he was taking. His answer was that the designs had nothing to do with him. They were about the two chefs. Both ran for more than thirty years. Jean Georges is still open, and Le Cirque closed, as he tells it, only when Maccioni died.

That is why he refuses to work in a single style. He said he is almost envious of designers who do one thing and tell clients to take it or leave it, because it is so simple. He cannot work that way. He sees a different world in every chef.

Luxury is turning his back on technology

Simone moved to luxury, which Tihany has long defined as care and attention, and asked whether the industry is becoming more human or simply better at simulating it. Tihany would not give technology an inch. In food, service and restaurants, he said, it is all very basic, and technology barely enters. When it does, it only does damage. Good food and service run from the heart to the hand to the customer, and for him luxury means turning his back on the machines.

He wants none of it at the table. He has no interest in being served by a robot. He would rather close his eyes and picture a grandmother in the kitchen making tortellini one by one, because that is the warmth he is after: the sense that someone has paid personal attention, that they care whether you enjoy the meal, whether you are happy, whether you come back. None of that, he said, needs any technology at all.

The DVD that never killed cinema

For the HumanX question, Simone asked whether there is even one case where technology and humanity might go hand in hand. Tihany said he was sure there is, then added, hopefully not in his lifetime.

His example came from outside food. When the DVD arrived, everyone said it was the end of the cinema, that people would stay home and watch films alone. It did not happen, and cinemas are as busy as ever, because people want to be around other people. They want to feel the room laugh at the comedy and go quiet at the tragedy. Technology, in his view, does the opposite. It isolates people and cuts them off from real friends and real emotion, and he had no soft words for it. Social media, he said, is a criminal enterprise.

Simone asked whether the same thing happens with food, with delivery and meals eaten alone in front of a screen. Tihany said it does, sadly, and that it is raising people who lose the physical capacity to communicate, who tell the driver to leave the food at the door because they do not want to deal with anyone. Do it often enough and it starts to feel normal. He fights it, and by the end of the conversation Simone had cheerfully declared himself one of his soldiers.

He closed on something he clearly loves. He is, by his own description, completely analogue, and a serious music fan. Vinyl sales, he said, have risen by around a thousand percent over the past decade, and he puts it down to the ritual, the small effort of sliding the record from its sleeve and setting it down to play. If you want to get somewhere worth reaching, he said, you have to put in the work.