May 27, 2008 |
Short Order
Designer Adam Tihany’s “Image Board” for La Fonda del Sol’s Café.
La Fonda Del Sol, named for Joe Baum’s long-gone pink hacienda by Alexander Girard in the Time-Life Building, will open this fall on Vanderbilt Avenue on the hip of the MetLife building. Critics and fans liked to say that Restaurant Associates’ Pan-Latin Fonda del Sol, one of the first theme restaurants, in its revolutionary modernist setting, was “totally ahead of its time” in 1961. It was “fiercely, perhaps fatally authentic,” I wrote in New York (November 2, 1970) though, in fact, it lasted a decade. Tattered menus still sell on Ebay. Now, Nick Valenti, chief of Patino Group (formerly Restaurant Associates) thinks La Fonda’s time has come at last. Having surrendered Tropica, in its time a major destination, then later overlooked in the core of the MetLife building, to a Chase ATM center, he emerged with this space on the street.
I loved La Fonda, coveting Girard’s folk art collection of Central and South America toys and puppets installed throughout in illuminated windows (now in a New Mexico museum). Indeed, except for the uniforms by Rudi Gernreich and low-back pedestal chairs by Eames, Girard had a design hand in everything, using bold geometric patterns and uninhibited color: carpets, tile, dishes, salt and pepper shakers, napkins, matchbooks, stylized metal suns everywhere, the little adobe house that enclosed the bar. My favorite memory is walking into the ladies room and finding a customer bathing an infant in one of the pink sinks.
“It was very sophisticated for its time,” the designer Adam Tihany says, “But what worked then, doesn’t work now. Tastes have changed. Golden suns?” he scoffs. So don’t expect an homage to Girard in Tihany’s scheme for the street-side bar-lounge and raised dining room. “But if you know, you might see a trail. The pattern of the terrazzo floor hints of the tile he used on the counters. And that pink appears in the upholstery pattern.” As both Valenti and Tihany point out, a lot of people didn’t get it at the time anyway. “Seviche in the 60s,” says Valenti. “That was before sushi. But savvy people were thrilled.”
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