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Adam Tihany: Beyond the Bistro
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20598 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
1,832 Words |
| Author
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Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
"I used to be a regular designer until the fatal accident of opening a restaurant. I think that was truly a turning point in my career. Having that night job and learning in my own place what it means to operate a restaurant, not only designing form the exterior but actually running one, really changed me."
That's how Adam D. Tihany begins to explain his international success as a restaurant designer. He goes on. "I belong to a very bizarre category of people who live to eat. I don't eat to live. For me to drive three or four hours to go to a good restaurant, that's normal. Food truly is not only my business, it's also my hobby."
How did a Jewish boy born on New Year's Day in Transylvania become America's arguably pre-eminent restaurant designer, a member of Interior Design's architectural hall of fame, and co-owner of Remi, which purveys Venetian-style cuisine in New York and Los Angeles? Even though Tihany says that he was "born in the restaurant business," he admits that his family did not have a particularly strong culinary tradition. But while designing his first restaurant, La Coupole in New York in 1982, an homage to the great Parisian bistro of the same name, he remembers that he "felt drawn into this business. I felt it sort of calling me. Saying, 'Come on in. this is going to be fun. And you can eat your way through it, too. Get a lot of free meals.' It was probably meant to be."
A lot of experiences contributed to what Tihany now sees as inevitable. Tihany's parents moved to Israel when he was three years old. An only child, he grew up in Jerusalem and like many Israeli kids was crazy for America, reading Mad magazines and Playboy as a teenager. Tihany's father was a lawyer and close to Menachem Begin during his renegade, militant Zionist days.
After doing the requisite three-year service in the Israeli army, including fighting in the Six Day War, Tihany felt "claustrophobic" in Israel. "Before going into the army, I was torn about whether to become a biologist or a lawyer and politician. The lawyer and politician had to do with my upbringing. The biology was my rebellion. While I was in the army, I thought that if I wanted to be a lawyer and a politician, I would have to stay in Israel. If I became a biologist, I would never make any money. So I was looking for a profession that combined all three. Architecture, of course, is the answer," he laughs.
The career choice did come, at least partly, serendipitously: Two of his friends
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