Design Time

"Once a culinary backwater," Austin is now home to restaurants where the design is as high-minded as the food, writes Rachel Feit at the Austin Chronicle. She interviews Michael Hsu and Jamie Chioco, veterans of the Dick Clark studio that had an "undeniable" impact on restaurant design here in the last twenty years. Says Hsu, of restaurants that don't have strong design concepts: "Restaurants that don't do that will find it much harder to succeed." [Austin Chronicle]