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Architects: Doyle Collection
- Area: 346 m²
- Year: 2013
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Photographs:Satoru Umetsu/ Nacasa&Partners Inc
Text description provided by the architects. Deformation of our tradition and good localization are essential in order to make Japanese culture easier to be accepted by foreign countries. This is a Japanese cutlet restaurant chain called ”Saboten”, the first flagship restaurant in China.
Here, viewing the future visions of restaurant chain, we made designs that will become useful manuals when expanding to China and also overseas. First of all, one of our challenges was to grasp the right understanding of “Japanese images” that the foreigners prefer. We focused mainly on” traditional Japan”. At present, compared with this modern style brand, we put in effort on how to incorporate this” traditional Japan”. One of our approaches was to add traditional aspects to the materials. Furthermore we made deformation and by adjusting this to modern style, we created a new identity. And this, in fact, made the foreigners easier to understand our outcome.
And here is another approach we challenged. We tried to understand the local culture and to partly localize the designs and layouts. You will see this from the height and position of the partitions. We also adopted round tables. This is one way of localization. Nevertheless, it is just one of our Japanese minds of hospitality known as ”Omotenashi”. We came up with this conclusion when we considered about improving customers satisfaction in a flexible way. But this does not mean that we created this Japanese restaurant so that it will look like Chinese restaurants.
In this way, Japanese restaurant Saboten that we “delivered” to China received good reputation to a wide range of customers. And also to the Japanese, this restaurant gained attention with a fresh impression look. It has become an excellent example of integrating traditional Japan and contemporary Japan.
