Our involvement with the Kriticos family, owners of Olympia Grill, began when Jay Louden (then with Ford, Powell & Carson) worked on the their second location, at Galveston's Pier 21.  Ten years later, they decided to cross the causeway to the mainland, opening a new location in League City.  The family chose Work5hop to help bring their ideas to reality.

We began with an extended programming and workflow phase.  The working efficiency of a restaurant hinges on ensuring that the kitchen can operate smoothly, with good connections between stations and as food is handed off to the expo line, where plates are finished.  It's important for the servers to have a direct, unbroken path from the expo line out into the dining room and then back from the dining room to the dish area as well.  Servers also need easy paths from the dining areas to beverage stations, which should also have lines of vision out to the dining area.  We worked with the owners and restaurant staff extensively through multiple layout options to ensure that all of those considerations were incorporated.

The next step was to create a vision for the new restaurant.  We believe that good design is contextual, and the context in this case was not well defined -- the site is a brand new suburban shopping center, and League City does not have a clearly defined identity which could offer direction.  So we took Olympia's Greek seafood menu as an inspiration and incorporated the materials of the greater Houston industries as well: steel and concrete, with patterning abstracted from octopus tentacles and blues and rust reds from traditional Greek decorative arts.

To mediate the scale of the large dining area, we used custom-fabricated lighting "clouds" -- metal bar stock fabricated into grids, with plywood panels to hold lighting, speakers, and other elements.  Semi-circular banquettes with backing pieces made from metal tubes are scalloped to be reminiscent of waves, and the raw wood of the tables warms up the space.