Graffit
141 West 69th Street
New York, NY
Tel: 646-692-8762
Designer: Garrett Singer Architecture & Design

Graffit, a new restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, is more than just a showcase for the chef and owner Jesús Núñez Rábano’s culinary creations, it’s a homage to his former life as a graffiti artist in his native Madrid.

Working with the female-owned construction firm Aerial Design and Build and well-known restaurant architect Garrett Singer Architecture & Design (Soho Park, Havana Central), the uptown brownstone space was made to look as though “a graffiti artist had moved in,” said Dena Singer, the firm’s director.

The interior space is divided up into three main areas—tapas and bar, dining room, and garden room—each with its own distinct personality and color palettes that were inspired by the chef’s vivid comestible constructions. Though this space was formerly home to another restaurant, its interior was essentially gutted, reconstructed, and then finally deconstructed to give it a patina of age and “make it seem abandoned,” according to Singer.

Chilean-born graffiti muralist Dasic is responsible for much of the wall art, including the faux greenery on the brick walls of the garden room in the photo above, and the wall in the dining room that features a matador and bull engaged in battle, alluding to the restaurant’s roots in Spanish cuisine.