PJH Studios

Tag: restaurant

  • Middle class restaurants disappearing

    Those casual dining restaurants where you could walk in with out a reservation are slowly disappearing.

    Once rapidly growing commercial marvels, casual dining chains — sit-down restaurants where middle-class families can walk in without a reservation, order from another human and share a meal — have been in decline for most of the 21st century. Last year, TGI Fridays and Red Lobster both filed for bankruptcy. Outback and Applebee’s have closed dozens of locations. Pizza Hut locations with actual dining rooms are vanishingly rare, with hundreds closing since 2019.

  • Exporting the Irish Pub

    There’s an entire business devoted to exporting the Irish pub vibe.

    But founder Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.

    The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.