David Rockwell on 40 Years of Hospitality Design

That first trip to catch a Broadway show and experience a true New York City restaurant can leave an impression on anyone. For 12-year-old David Rockwell, it was foundation-shifting, not only for him, but for future generations of chefs and restaurant guests.

At the time, his family lived in New Jersey, just before they moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. But the trip into NYC left Rockwell in love. With New York. With theater. With restaurants, and the community they created. 

Shaped by that experience, Rockwell further developed that love in Mexico, as he earned an architecture degree, and an early job working for a Broadway lighting designer. He imparts theatrical drama on every space he designs, and he creates a fresh wave of experiences in the hospitality business. 

Chefs took notice. 

“Anything cool and amazing, he was the man behind it,” says chef Simon Kim. “He was the holy grail. I dreamt of and admired his work for as long as I can remember.” 

Over the course of 40 years, Rockwell’s client list could be an excerpt from a Chef Hall of Fame. The Rockwell Group has about 3,750 completed projects to its credit. That includes nearly 1,000 restaurants, from the 24-seat Frevo to the 450-seat Din Tai Fung, as well as 350 or so employees mainly based in New York, and offices in Los Angeles and Madrid. The company has designed restaurants in more than 200 cities across six continents. 

“The goal was never, and is never, scale,” says Rockwell. “It was about a massive curiosity and interest in how different projects relate. If you aren’t willing to take creative risk, you have very little chance of creating something great.” 

For Rockwell, every design has focused on bringing people together. 

“In a background of moving around a lot and early losses, it attracted me to those things that created meaning and connection,” he says. Theater gave him an instant connection, as did the local corner taco stand when he lived in Mexico and the hundreds of restaurants there that sparked his interest. “So much life happened in this exchange around food,” he says. 

Studies at Syracuse University and the Architectural Association in London led Rockwell to work for a handful of architects. That included Broadway lighting designer Roger Morgan, where he learned how lighting could affect sightlines and mood. 

His start in hospitality came as a project designer for a club on East 54th Street in New York City. On opening night, someone asked him to renovate a restaurant set to open just six weeks later. That pop-up was successful, and based on that work, he was offered Sushi Zen, his first true restaurant project. 

That was 1984, and already he saw it as a culmination of his thoughts on communal dining, relationships, theater, and architecture. “It was life and death for me to get it right,” he says. He says that he’s still enthralled by the electricity of opening night. 

Even during his strict modernist training, he focused on substance. “I was interested in movement and narrative,” he says. “I found spaces more interesting in movement, which is great for a restaurant, seeing them as a series of spaces.” 

Every detail is rooted in the chef’s food. “My approach is writing a backstory so that no decision is arbitrary,” he says. “In a restaurant, we are writing a backstory that has to do with the chef. We dig very deeply into the location, the use of ingredients, the distances coming from the kitchen.” 

That’s why the renowned 1994 Rockwell-designed Nobu in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood features cherry blossoms stenciled on the floor. “The original Nobu in Tribeca will always be one of my favorite Rockwell designs,” says chef Nobu Matsuhisa. “No one had ever seen anything like it before. David was able to transform an old bank into the Japanese countryside. There were life-size birch trees, river-rock walls, and cherry blossoms stenciled on the wood floors. He created a simple, yet stunning design that people still talk about to this day.” 

Since then, the Rockwell Group has designed more than 30 hotels and restaurants for Nobu, spanning 28 cities. “I trust David because he understands my philosophy, and it shows in his designs,” says Matsuhisa. 

Rockwell’s success, however, began with Sushi Zen, a narrow space that made the typical sushi bar layout challenging. Rockwell suggested a lightning bolt-shaped bar in white stone, which created sections for groups to gather. It established a line of sight between the customer and chef, and it used materials like scorched ash — Rockwell used a blowtorch to texture the wood — to connect directly to the food. 

Nobu offered a deeper vision of Japanese influence, all part of understanding how story and food shine. “Each kind of food has an expectation,” says Rockwell. One such interpretation helped shape what luxury dining could be, as he moved away from the use of tablecloths to create a space inspired by Japanese Kabuki theater. 

Daily Provisions, which Rockwell describes as having the most design per square inch due to numerous small, detailed spaces, obsessed over the exact shade of blue to best allow Danny Meyer’s bakery to transition from day to night. The motif was designed to resemble an urban country store. 

At Next Door Nobu, the open kitchen turned into a stage. That required metal workers from Milan, an artist from Amsterdam, and a kitchen designer from Japan to come together to create a moment that feels organic. 

Those moments overlap with Rockwell’s love of theater — he’s also a prolific Broadway set designer — and the need to create a scene. “Design is not foreground. It is how to welcome people in,” says Rockwell. 

To create a space that connects the food and people around you requires an understanding of a “million little details,” everything from how close the tables should be to the depth of the banquettes. 

“If the memory is not linked to the food, you did something really wrong and should be at a retail store,” he says. “I think about memory and how it marks an occasion.” 

Harlem chef Melba Wilson, who has collaborated with Rockwell on DineOut NYC initiatives and her own restaurants, says she’ll often see Rockwell sitting in a newly opened space in case adjustments are needed. 

“A memorable design goes beyond aesthetics,” says Wilson. “It evokes emotion, tells a story, and creates a sensory experience.” For Melba’s 550, David and his team incorporated natural elements and textures, introducing intricate aspects of Wilson’s Harlem and Southern roots. That includes the impact that her grandmother, Amelia, had on her cooking. It all formed what Wilson calls a “well-designed space that leaves people feeling inspired and comforted, long after they leave.” 

That constant focus has enabled Rockwell to pioneer several concepts in hospitality. There’s a focus on lighting, but there are many others, such as the open kitchen, regardless of the space's size. 

“In restaurants, lighting is everything,” says Rockwell. From a simple candle at a table to a hearth that brings together a large room. “Lighting lets you know where to look. It paints the perimeter of the room,” he says. “Lighting then lets you know the specialty of that overall piece, affects how you see the food. 

“It also deals with mood,” says Rockwell. “There is a reason why people want to be in a place that has a warm glow. You look better. You feel better and breathe differently. Lighting paints the size of the room, establishes the character, establishes the mood and creates the room within a room.” 

Open kitchens help set drama. “We put as much love into Wayan (84 seats) as we did into Din Tai Fung (420 seats),” he says. “In both of those two extremes, you can see [with] Din Tai Fung where we made a subterranean space feel celebratory. The dumpling chef is like a black-and-white movie in the middle of this big CinemaScope piece. And in Wayan, you can really see the background history, sense of smell all brought forward with an open kitchen.” 

The “room within a room” concept creates visual draws that invite guests in to provide a sense of place. It fosters comfort and connection, as seen at Metropolis by Marcus Samuelsson.

At Simon Kim’s Coqodaq, Rockwell wanted arches to evoke a sense of travel, while Kim envisioned a grand hall with high ceilings and unobstructed energy. So, Rockwell created a “ghost arch.” 

Instead of walls, he used light to keep the room open and create visual delineations. “It is the most important design feature of Coqodaq,” says Kim. “It looks beautiful. It is so photogenic. It is not a cheap endeavor, and there was no shortage of design iterations all custom-made overseas, but I feel like that brings such a drama to the room.” 

That’s not its only feature. Coqodaq is a cathedral of fried chicken, and when you visit a cathedral, you first must cleanse yourself, says Kim. Rockwell installed sinks in front with linen napkins and designer hand soaps. 

“We wanted to make that utilitarian act of washing hands into a joyful, hospitable, and really memorable experience,” says Kim. “I believe dinner is as much entertainment as it is nurturing experiences. Featuring that drama has been a great perk.”

Rockwell believes that every restaurant has a problem to solve. For The Corner Store, it was to take something people thought they knew and create a different iteration. Rosa Mexicana gave Rockwell the chance to craft a portrait of his time in Mexico, but he also had to solve for an upstairs space. So, he made the stairs “super seductive.” His lighting innovation includes hand-blown pendant fixtures for Vong, one of Rockwell’s favorite projects. Creating an amphitheater for Tao Downtown inspired by opera houses required embedded bars along the sides so servers had a shorter distance to carry food. 

The hidden part of design is relationships, since “creating something really unique requires mutual trust.” As Kim puts it, you only have one chance to get it right. 

“Not only does he provide us with an amazing space that is commercially successful, but him as a person is just a real inspiration,” says Kim. “David is one of my closest friends now.” 

Kim said that Rockwell Group can deliver like a large firm, but it maintains the nimbleness of a mom-and-pop shop. He mentions that he can call Rockwell at any time to “create a waltz” as chefs and designers collaborate. 

Rockwell’s process has remained largely unchanged over the past four decades, although he now values it more and draws on a more personal history and context. He recognizes that projects are not permanent—he’s renovating restaurants he worked on years ago—so he focuses on how the restaurant will attract customers today. His sense of gratitude has similarly grown. Chefs now collaborate so willingly with him. The relationship he has built with his staff is deep. Some employees have been with him for more than 30 years. 

Rockwell believes his career is driven by curiosity and not seeing boundaries. A multidisciplinary approach helps him discover new ways to create connections and build relationships. Despite all his planning, preparation, and storytelling, his goal is to “allow a spontaneous moment to happen.” His first big moment came when he was 12, and there have been countless more since.