10,000 Bones Cover the Walls of this Mexico Restaurant
Locally sourced food and materials aren’t new in the world of high-end dining. But when designer Ignacio Cadena began working on a new concept in Jalisco, Mexico, for chef Alfonso Cadena, he took a whole new approach to sourcing material. After six months of digging and searching, he assembled a set of 10,000 bleached animal bones, which, when set in boxes with cooking utensils and objects in a way that calls to mind Robert Rauschenberg, turned the interior of the restaurant into a slightly macabre mural.
Hueso (which means bone in Spanish) features murals made from 10,000 bones, a reference to the chef’s natural cooking style. It’s part of a "Darwinian vision," says designer Ignacio Cadena, and required six months of scouring north Mexico, cleaning, and purifying to get the off-white skeletal pieces ready.
"It’s a bit of a Darwinian vision of how things work," says Cadena. "My dialogue with the chef was about a vision of his food, that we’ll still eat traditionally and eat animals in a raw, natural, and conscientious way."
Housed in a former artist’s studio, Hueso exudes a certain starkness and seriousness of purpose, from the custom tiles on the exterior (with a thicket of dashes based on the patterns of local weavers) to the long communal tables and basket at the host’s stand, a suggestion to drop off your phone before dining. While the design begs for attention, the long, continuous mural and shared seating put a focus on community and the chef’s own irreverent cooking.
"He’s adventurous, like his cooking," says Cadena about the chef. "He doesn’t care what anybody thinks."
"The pieces told us what they wanted to do on the wall," Cadena says. The menagerie of bones, including pieces from boar, turtles, and even a whale's vertebrae, are deliberately off-white, so it doesn't come across as too pure. The tables and chairs are separated from the walls, so diners aren't too distracted by the details of the elaborate, hand-made murals, which include silverware, serving utensils, and pieces from books.
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