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The Beef Club had been a very popular existing restaurant but the client wanted a complete makeover for the restaurant based on a new culinary idea for food preparation - cooking exclusively with fire. The concept of the project combines the archaic and the technological: cooking with fire but using the most energy efficient technologies possible to efficiently filter, draft, and vent it through an existing multi-use building. At the center of the space is the theatrical preparation of food on a grill - and an open brick fireplace is positioned where everyone can see it, recalling an archaic fire at the center of a shared dining experience. The grill is elevated on a brick plinth for visibility, but also to recall cultural forms like altars that highlight the importance of the ceremony.
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The former restaurant had used the same space to a make an exclusive inward-looking room, detached from its setting. The new design opens the space to become a new, bright, open dining room that focuses on views of the adjacent canal by positioning long tables perpendicular to the views outside. Dining also expands onto an outdoor terrace with the same rhythm of furniture made from the same materials as the interior. In this way, the design makes explicit the relationship between the fire on the grill and the water in the canal. Socially, the restaurant has been deliberately redesigned to overcome the perceived exclusivity of the previous restaurant to become more welcoming and attractive to the community of Wolfsburg, genuinely inviting the broader community into the campus.
The design of the restaurant addresses sustainability in the most fundamental way: it reuses as much existing material as possible from the previous restaurant while upcycling an underperforming space into something desirable and more efficient. Major components of the material from the old restaurant were saved in place, reused, and transformed into new space – floors, walls, lighting, technical installations. All of the food in the restaurant is prepared on a wood fire, using locally sourced, renewable resources for fuel. Burning wood is part of the natural carbon cycle - the CO2 emitted during wood burning is roughly equal to the amount of CO2 absorbed by the tree during its growth – and it reduces reliance on fossil fuels to prepare food.
Beef Club “Fire + Salt” is a radical refresh of an existing eatery in Autostadt, the automotive theme park at the headquarters of Volkswagen Group in Wolfsburg. At the center of the space is the theatrical preparation of food on a grill - and an open brick fireplace is positioned where everyone can see it, recalling an archaic fire at the center of a shared dining experience. The theme of the dining menu is “Fire & Salt” – so, in the interior design, building materials were also selected based on this theme. The open part of the kitchen is made from brick – baked earth. This hearth is made from a composition of three kinds of fired brick – glazed and unglazed in different formats. The brick grill grows out of the podium in an assemblage of inter-related volumes. Outside, the brick becomes the floor of the terrace and becomes built-in benches. Salt is also used as a building material. A large block of solid salt sits on the brick plinth as a table for display; wood dining tables have been treated with salt to introduce unique colors, patterns, and textures. The whole ensemble is brought together in a colorful and joyous composition of discrete rooms within rooms. The concept of the project is to combine the archaic and the technological: cooking with fire is as old as our species, but to do it within a large modern structure - with lots of other uses - combines the most ancient techniques with the most contemporary.
The design results form a competition winning design based on a very clear client brief. The Beef Club had been a very popular existing restaurant but the client had a new culinary idea for food preparation and desired a complete makeover for the restaurant to highlight the new approach. The brief described a menu based on cooking exclusively with fire, and from the beginning, the client wanted something that would celebrate the theatricality of cooking with fire.
Ester Bruzkus Architekten is a Berlin-based design studio that focuses on interiors. We like working with straight lines, precise planning, material differences, and plenty of surprises. We like contrasts of thick and thin, sharp and soft, curved and straight, rough and smooth, common and opulent, colorful and restrained, playful and well-resolved. We like projects that create a dialogue of space and light, materiality and color, existing constraints and new opportunities. We like boxes within boxes, rooms within rooms, the blurring of inside and out, material contrasts, and surprising color combinations. We collect images and colors that speak to our heart and combine them in our own way. We find inspiration in lots of places... old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows...
