Why Stained Glass Is Making a Comeback at Restaurants and Bars

A halo of pale yellow light frames a jar of Duke’s mayonnaise. Supported by clouds of emulsified egg and oil, the iconic condiment jar floats atop a classic deli mise en place: mottled salami, wavy bacon strips, a kaleidoscopic pickle, Swiss cheese, crimson tomato slices, a hoagie roll, lettuce leaves, and two green olives as eyes, staring into the beholder’s soul. Artist Devin Balara fused each foodstuff together with precisely cut colored glass and lead. Backlit and hung above the bar at Your Only Friend in Washington, D.C., the stained glass sets a scene of grand sandwich reverence. 

When designers first suggested stained glass to Your Only Friend owners Sherra Kurtz and Paul Taylor, Kurtz envisioned Tiffany-style lamps like the ones in Midwestern taverns where she worked as a young bartender. Taylor hoped to snag a few vintage Pizza Hut lamps. Instead, working with Balara, they got a custom 85-square-foot, 25-panel installation dubbed the Sandwich Sistine Chapel. 

Stained glass has long inhabited a certain type of American restaurant, places where you can bet there’s a half-pound burger on the menu and beer on draught. Chains too — TGI Fridays and Pizza Hut among them — used stained glass to tap into neighborhood restaurant nostalgia as they conquered the suburbs.

But something new is afoot in the ancient craft. As a fresh cohort of artists embraces the medium, more independent restaurants have started to bejewel their dining rooms with custom stained glass, a move Balara sees as resistance to generic restaurant aesthetics. “For a while, everything looked like it opened with Hobby Lobby decor, walls of faux succulents, and neon lettering,” she says. “Stained glass is for folks with good taste, who make food that reflects their creativity.”

A lamp depicting doves carrying a hoagie from the heavens hangs in the back corner of Middle Child in Philadelphia. The door of Mason Hereford’s Hungry Eyes in New Orleans is set with geometric glass panels, complete with a pair of eyes. The remodel of historic restaurant La Dolce Vita in Beverly Hills came with a stained glass cheetah crest. Pasadena coffee shop Alfred features a rosette-accented mantra in floor-to-ceiling glass: “But First Coffee.” At Sullivan’s Fish Camp on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, Tiffany-style lamps helped founding partner Kate Towill create the feeling of the “’70s/Jaws/you-can-still-smoke-in-a-restaurant.”

Pierre Marie, a multi-disciplinary artist known for his work with Hermès, designed a stained glass window for chef Gregory Gourdet’s new New York City restaurant Maison Passerelle. The panels’ floral motifs reference spring, or “printemps” in French, with the central bouquet emerging from a clamshell like Botticelli’s Venus. The outer panels nod to the Art Nouveau-style building that houses the Paris original.

European stained glass techniques date back to the 11th century, and after disappearing into the black box of the Middle Ages, reemerged again in the late 19th century when the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc refurbished Notre Dame. At the time, the city built department stores as cathedrals, and those temples to consumerism adopted stained glass into their decor. Louis Comfort Tiffany began making his namesake glass during the same period.

Marie grew up in the Paris suburbs and remembers taking the train into the city to visit the windows at Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. A decade ago he began to explore the craft in earnest, first in his own home. Marie was surprised to learn the skills he had acquired in fabric and interior design translated well to stained glass, which he produces in collaboration with the storied Ateliers Duchemin Vitraux in Paris.

Modernism, according Marie, rendered stained glass gauche — hence its vestiges in less-than-fashionable restaurants. “Since the 1960s, and even more since the 1980s, there was this minimalist approach, where every decorated element had to go to the trash bin,” he says. “I wanted to reconnect with the idea that we’ve always been surrounded by patterns, ornaments, colors, and stories. I wanted to reconnect the craft of stained glass with its own past and history, and make it relevant for our times.”

Stateside, stained glass underwent a pandemic-era revival that’s now manifesting in restaurant interiors. Balara was a trained sculptor and welder before taking a just-for-fun stained glass making class in 2020. “I thought immediately, ‘I did this in a past life,’” says Balara, who has also made pieces for Care Forgot Beercraft and Bar Pomona in New Orleans, where she lives.

Similarly, Lily Feingold got laid off during the pandemic and, via YouTube, retaught herself how to meld glass and metal, a skill she had first explored as a kid in summer camp. Feingold is responsible for the cheeky hoagie lamp at Middle Child, where she’s a regular. She’s also produced transom windows for Philadelphia’s Meetinghouse, Carbon Copy, and Sea Forest Bake Shop, whose window depicts a sea slug slithering out of a giant cake.

“We’re in this new age where it’s possible to get started on the internet,” says Ben Houtcamp, a stained glass maker in Chicago. ”We have Instagram and YouTube. The mechanics of it really aren’t that complicated. You just have to be willing to get your fingers cut and do the work.”

Houtcamp, however, learned the trade from his father, an expert stained glass artist. As a side hustle, he had taken a few commissions but never considered himself architecturally inclined enough for the medium. That changed in 2020 when Houtcamp was furloughed from a job and quickly realized that he never wanted to go back. “It was a special time for creative people,” he says, a bit wistfully.

Houtcamp’s work often revolves around themes of pareidolia, or the human tendency to see meaning in the random and inanimate. He designed the doors at Hungry Eyes. At Pizza Lobo in Chicago, he hung a 16-foot prism light in which diners may notice subtle, pepperoni-like circles. He appreciates the way modern stained glass brings fun and joy into a space through a medium with ties to the church. There’s primal satisfaction in staring into warmly lit glass, he says, something akin to a campfire.

Post-pandemic, after so many restaurant closures, stained glass also represents a certain kind of optimism and rootedness. The art plants restaurants in time, in a long lineage of hospitality and food business. At Larder in Cleveland, chef Jeremy Umanksy recently hung salvaged stained glass panels from a local grocer originally opened in the 1920s. Frozen in glass, a meat grinder, chickens, steaks, and salamis resonate in his modern Jewish delicatessen, housed in a building from the mid-19th century. “It’s literally 100 years of repurposed history, and I get to hang it as art, honoring this beautiful craft,” says Umansky.

Your Only Friend also occupies an address with hundreds of years of history, though the sandwich shop and cocktail bar is the first restaurant resident at 1114 9th Street NW. “Coming out of the pandemic, there was this feeling that things don’t last forever. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put everything we are into the restaurant,” says Kurtz. “It has to reflect who we are and how we feel about what we’re making inside of these walls.”

Taylor adds, “Sherra and I are both of the church of Duke’s.”

Why is stained glass relevant today? Marie, who leans philosophical, says we’re lost in time, failed by modernity and lacking landmarks that connect us to our past and humanity. That’s to say nothing of our looming sense of dread. “We need a spark,” he says. “We need more color in our lives. With stained glass, when you enter a room, the gray light from outside — from the real world — is filtered through beautiful pieces of glass. This is the filter we all need.”