East! Asian Street Flair Restaurant, Toronto

East! Asian Street Flair, a 5,200-square-foot eatery, offers traditional Asian street cooking in a stylish setting. The existing building, a former tavern, required a new façade and structural stabilization. The new design clads the existing building with a box superstructure of lightweight, custom-stained marine-grade mahogany plywood strips. Natural limestone tiles and large windows give the building sufficient presence to transform the adjacent, formerly dark alleyway into a pleasant pathway.

Like the menu’s fusion cuisine, the design interprets an oriental-garden inspiration with a modern twist. Columns evoking bamboo trunks frame walls, ceilings, stairway portals and form lattice-like screens, creating an interplay of shadows. Along one wall, the tree metaphor blossoms into delicate, custom, hand-sewn branches with jewel-encrusted buds.

Levitt: It’s lovely. The seating looks comfortable.

Sorensen: You’d expect a lot of reverberation but the breaking-up of the space should trap the noise.