Restaurant As is a city restaurant with a countryside feel. Located on a quiet lane next to a park on the edge of the city, it occupies the ground floor of a striking circular building constructed as a chapel in the 1950s. Priests once learned how to deliver sermons in the alcoves arranged around its central altar.
To preserve the devout silent indoors, Bas van Tol placed much of the interior outdoors, thereby making use of the entire site. The design emphasises cooking as an activity that deserves of its own volume. The open, steel kitchen structure features a stone pizza oven and is wrapped in canvas tarps that roll up in good weather, intensifying the connection between inside and outside.
By enclosing the entire site with an 8-m-tall fence, Bas van Tol forms a welcoming facade, creates a vertical garden for growing herbs and storing logs, defines the courtyard seating area, and enhances the sense of an outdoor room.
The simple and seasonal cuisine is mirrored in the choice of materials, such as long tables of French oak and granite clinker-bricks for the floor. A shade of grey from the original architecture dominates the subdued colour palette and sets off the gold-painted nature motifs that adorn the alcove walls as traces of the building’s new purpose.
Priests once directed services from the centre of the circle, a place now occupied by an island from where food is served, a reflection of the design’s aim to present food as a ritual. Bas van Tol has ensured that a sense solemnity still prevails.
Completed in 2007, Restaurant As was intended to remain in existence for just two years. It is still open today.