All’onda
22 East 13th Street, New York
Tel: 212-231-2366
Designers: Jack Dakin & Silvia Zofio

All’onda is a new restaurant in the Village that dishes up Venetian Italian cuisine prepared through the lens of global influences, specifically Japanese. This cultural combination served as a jumping off point for design duo Jack Dakin and Silvia Zofio. “I think in this day and age, fusion is a dirty word,” said Dakin. “But in this case we had an opportunity to do a little bit of that while we were developing the concepts for the interior.”

“From the Italian we were getting rustic materials: white washed brick walls, dark walnut, and blackened steel,” said Zofio. “We got simplicity from the Japanese: geometric screens and hand-made hexagonal tiles.”

The two-story restaurant is divided between a bar downstairs and a dining room upstairs. Upon entering, diners are greeted by a 10-seat, white Calacatta marble bar on the right. To the left is a communal walnut table with seating for 12. The hexagonal tile floor, in various shades of light blue, gives over to dark walnut at the staircase, which has blackened steel railings.

Upstairs, the atmosphere is more airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking over 13th Street and flooding the interior with light. Here, Venetian nautical themes predominate, including banquettes with cushion ties and sliding doors with porthole-like windows. The Japanese influence is present as well with a continuation of the hexagonal tile floor and a large abstracted print of water that evokes Far East calligraphy as much as the Laguna Veneta.