Ref: article by Mossimiliano Mocchia Di Coggiola, Sky Blue, May 2023
There are places one goes to be seen, and others where one goes to hide. One pays (sometimes dearly!) to hide; but it is self-evident that the most luxurious places are those made to put us on display.
Since the end of the Ancien Régime, the theater has ceased to be a fashionable meeting place, a showcase: today one goes there to watch a performance, which is often quite tiresome. I am even told that most aficionados of the Deauville races go there to bet—for real. So, if we exclude debutante balls, we are left with the restaurant.
The restaurant is a valid theater for staging our boredom (and sometimes, our company). Slavik was probably not the first to have understood this, but in the modern era, he was certainly the first to make it a modus operandi. And to conceive a restaurant décor as one imagines a theater: a theater where one is both actor and spectator. We should stop telling ourselves that we don’t judge a book by its cover: this intellectualization of cuisine is very French, alas, just as we claim that the best books are those wrapped in a simple yellowish cover.
Slavik was therefore much more than a decorator: his restaurants, his pubs, his “drugstores,” his boutiques aimed to arouse the client’s wonder, to stimulate his sense of beauty, to tickle his snobbery. Creator of microcosms for bon vivants, Slavik said of himself and his team: “We are not decorators; we are boulevard theater people. We want something to happen.”
Those were the 1970s-80s, the apex of his glory, rewarded by the trophy for Creation of the Most Beautiful Contemporary Restaurant 1987 for the décor of the restaurant Le Jules Verne, a grandiose staging with Cubist accents on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. Strangely, the most “minimalist” of his interiors!
