Working with founder of Boqueria Yann de Rochefort and his team, Mancini leveraged our research and development team to create a new means of “acting out a space” before a hammer was ever swung. We are now working with this visionary restaurateur to expand his brand across the US.
Boqueria is a Spanish Tapas bar and restaurant chain that initially tapped Mancini to provide services for a new location in Nashville, Tennessee. As part of our work, Mancini delivered a fully interactive model of a new kitchen design for the Boqueria team to test before building using both virtual reality and augmented reality simulations. During a series of sessions engaging these simulations with the client, were able to elicit extraordinary feedback. Pivotal layout decisions were made, shifting equipment locations to increase efficiencies, or raising a shelf up four inches for better sightlines between stations, resulting in a healthy increase in future kitchen output.
With the success of this process, Mancini is now being leveraged to design, document, and roll‑out three to four new locations per year throughout the United States. We completed our Nashville build-out in late 2021, and are currently working on Boqueria locations in Boston, Massachusetts; West Hartford, Connecticut; Houston, Texas; Miami, Florida; and New York City.
Typical restaurants are about 5,000 to 7,000 sf in size and feature a 360° bar with tapa station, an open kitchen, main dining room, private dining room, and a luxurious back-of-house space. Layouts and décor are designed to echo the eclectic ambience of traditional Spanish food markets, like the restaurant’s namesake La Boquería in Barcelona, while also recalling the timelessness of mid-century European modernism through the thoughtful use of exposed wood and custom metal accents and light fixtures.
Although Boqueria had established design standards prior to our involvement, we’ve been both executing and elaborating upon what came before as we’ve worked on new locations. To take just one example, we’ve been designing a number of custom metal storefronts, a relative rarity in the hospitality field. At the Nashville location, the storefront is part of an operable system that opens up the restaurant interior into a patio, letting the hustle and bustle of both spaces flow into one another.