As the name implies, The Globe is a very large restaurant in a very large city, New York. It is also a multifaceted eating establishment that addresses diners’ needs from the earliest morning breakfasts through late night lounging.

The Globe occupies a 5,500 sq ft, L-shaped space with two entrances, one from Park Avenue South into a take-out and counter seating area, and one from 26th Street into a softly lit lounge. An additional 3,000 sq ft of kitchen space is found below ground.

The restaurant concept was loosely based on the scale and casual feeling of the early 20th century American cafeteria. The cafeteria was the first large scale, rapid service, multi-location, middle class restaurant; the precursor to the diner, the luncheonette and even the fast food franchise. Its image was both elegant and sanitary (white dominating the color scheme), and the food was more familiar than exotic. Often open 24 hours a day, the cafeteria was a restaurant for all times and all people.

While the service is not the traditional self-help variety of cafeterias past, at the Globe it is as open, fast and friendly as the restaurant is familiar and refreshing.

Our interior design for The Globe plays with the referential qualities of its ethic: a new place you have been before. All the materials are classic, but the uses, shapes and forms are new. It includes a busy retail area, a large dining room, banquette seating, an active bar, a pizza oven, and a comfortable lounge.

Three circular ‘events’ define The Globe’s various areas, and reflect its name: the take-out counter where hot and cold prepared foods are sold and diners may sit for breakfast; the wood-burning pizza oven, a tower of glazed brick and stone which lends the dining room the casual feeling of an open kitchen; and the three-quarter round bar at the hub of the space’s L-shape, which offers views of the entire restaurant and serves as way station to the moodier lounge. Connecting this multitude of choices is an exuberant multicolored terrazzo floor straight out of the Thirties, lining the space in stripes, patterns, and spots of red, black, gold, and green.

A review called The Globe a “vast, handsome Jetsonian cafeteria, all clean curves and soft angles, full of gleam and promise, with striking light fixtures, a theater-in-the-round raw bar, and a marvelous burnt-hued spherophilic terrazzo floor” (New York Magazine).

If we knew what ‘spherophilic’ meant we would undoubtedly agree.