Facebook's Epic Cafe (Click Image To Enlarge)
ROMAN & WILLIAMS HAS CREATED NOSTALGIC INTERIORS THAT MOST OTHERS CAN ONLY EMULATE. HERE’S THE LUNCHROOM THEY CREATED WITH FACEBOOK.
Facebook's Epic Cafe cafeteria greats staffers with the words EAT at the start of the waiting line lane (Click Image To Enlarge)
Google ruined everything. Microsoft gave out free soft drinks, but Google let employees eat gourmet food for free. How can you possibly differentiate mealtime in Silicon Valley with that act to follow?
Facebook's Epic Cafe knows how to put out the food fr Facebook staffers -- and there's plenty of it (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook's Epic Cafe food looks delicious. Here's one of the salad bars (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook aimed for cool. They hired Roman & Williams--the ultra-hip powerhouse firm behind landmark projects like the Ace Hotel--to create their Epic Cafe. In reality, Roman & Williams is mostly the vision of husband-and-wife design team Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, who are largely credited with the trend of alluring, faux-nostalgic interiors, pieced together through an alchemy of heirloom furniture, found objects, warm woods, grommets, and occasionally, even flannel. Their look is what the New York Times calls the "Benjamin Button school of design," or a nostalgia for a time that never actually existed. Indeed, if interiors had an Instagram filter, it’d be Roman & Williams.
Facebook’s Epic Cafe is their Menlo Park eatery created by Ace Hotel designers Roman & Williams (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook's Epic cafe is full of reclaimed furniture and custom pieces, all which create a post-industrial space that’s reminiscent of a schoolhouse or factory (Click Image To Enlarge)
Everything is left a step unfinished, to give the Epic Cafe's space a feel of constant flexibility and iteration, like the Facebook platform itself (Click Image To Enlarge)
The meeting between Facebook and Roman & Williams was happenstance. Everett Katigbak and Ben Barry, who head Facebook’s Analog Research Lab, actually bumped into Standefer and Alesch in the lobby of the Ace Hotel. What eventually resulted was a collaboration on Facebook’s Epic Cafe, a cafeteria that sits somewhere between a schoolhouse lunch line and a half-finished construction site. The spa has all the carefully curated objects of a Roman & Williams design mixed with the “don’t you dare finish painting those walls!” mentality of Facebook’s corporate culture.Facebook’s Everett Katigbak tells me.
“[That culture] indirectly starts with the product, not that we leave it unfinished, but we leave the product open to iteration. It’s a continual work in progress.”
Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak at Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory (Click Image To Enlarge)
Much of Katigbak’s job is ingraining Facebook’s culture into their buildings, designing interior spaces to ensure going to work at Facebook doesn’t feel like going to work anywhere else. So when Facebook opened its Menlo Park campus, Katigbak didn’t want one big design firm painting the grounds with a single stroke. Instead, he was inspired by Facebook’s roots, the tiny company that sprouted in Palo Alto, snagging a patchwork of buildings downtown to accommodate a quickly growing workforce.
Facebook's Epic Cafe has big, communal areas for socializing (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook's Epic Cafe also has quieter nooks for ideating (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook's Epic Cafe also has some neat, vintage prints hanging around too. But there isn’t a piece of taxidermy to be seen (Click Image To Enlarge)
Katigbak reminisces.
“It was interesting to have to run to meetings across town, navigate through the city. It had this feeling of energy we really liked and connected with.”
The Menlo Park campus itself is largely modeled to “feel like a city.” With the building serving as one blank canvas, employees were free (even encouraged) to claim their own spaces, creating a mini urban environment inside a corporate office.
And Epic Cafe had to feel like a social hotspot in this city--a place you wanted to go, meet, eat, and collaborate with friends in the company that you may not see in your normal office area.
Katigbak explains.
“On the general employee side, we wanted them to have something they felt proud of, a place ‘I’ get to eat as a destination, but flexible in a Facebook way. They could add to it without changing the overall vibe of it.”
The resulting space is like your childhood lunchroom, reformulated for adults. It’s largely Roman & Williams, filled with postindustrial furniture (some discovered, some crafted), found print art (magazine clippings), exposed light bulbs, and plenty of rivets. But whereas Roman & Williams’s brand of alchemy generally finishes these components, Facebook’s culture demands they stay raw. It’s no pseudo-swank hotel lobby; the cafeteria is built on a concrete floor and topped with exposed rafters, like a construction site waiting for the laminate and drywall guys to show up already. Since it’s Facebook, you could probably carve your name in a chair, but since it’s Roman & Williams, destroying the cultural artefact would be sacrilege.
I asked Facebook if they’d used any tricks of social hacking in the space, much like Google had found eight-person tables were the perfect number to prevent cliques yet maintain conversations. Katigbak says.
“We don’t get that granular, to find the optimal metrics and measurements.”
But he does see the value of communal seating in empowering “chance encounters,” and a few smaller tables have clearly been set up to allow two people to run a more focused discussion over lunch.
Indeed, the word that comes up again and again with Katigbak isn’t “synergy” or “networking.” And it certainly isn’t Google’s creed, which would probably be “optimization.” It’s simply “cool.” For however we may try to classify Roman & Williams, identifying the unifying threads or jealously criticizing its brand of quasi-retro chic, most of us agree, in this place and time, that it does feel “cool.” And Facebook’s cafeteria is pretty cool, too--for reasons a bit beyond mere association.
COMMENTARY: What a novel idea: A corporate cafeteria that is not finished, a work-in-progress, if you will, where staffers can add their personal embellishments to what is supposed to be the most popular spot on the Facebook's corporate campus in Menlo Park.
However, I differ greatly when it comes to describing Facebook's Epic Cafe as "cool." It's not cool at all. It looks entirely too institutional. The school cafeteria and unfinished construction zone look is most appropriate. To this I would add boring, bland, uncool, unFacebook, to name a few.
If you are going to use the term "cool" to describe something, it should be a absolutely unforgettable, an explosion to the senses and memorable almost to the point of being historic. Facebook's Epid Cafe does not meet those standards.
Having said this, Zuck hired away executive chef Josef L. Desimone from Google in 2011, and under his able hand, has formed quite an impressive Facebook Culinary Team (see below):
Facebook Culinary Team Tony Castellucci, Chris Moss, Josef L. Desimone, and Virgil HIdalgo (Click Image To Enlarge)
The Epic Cafe's menu is international in scale, befitting of a company with staffers from all parts of the globe. The food is highly ultra cuisine, very creative, tasty, healthy, there's a huge seletion of it, and it's 100% free to Facebook staffers, and served three times a day, and I don't think Facebook's hackers miss a meal. Here are a few examples from the Facebook Culinary Team page:
Courtesy of an article dated December 13, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated May 18, 2012 appearing in Business Insider
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Posted by: Amarita Golls | 01/07/2013 at 04:49 AM