Money Chicken Restaurant

2019 Winner – Interior Architecture

Project Narrative

Money Chicken is a fast-casual and sustainably-sourced restaurant with a look inspired by a pair of early 1990’s high-top sneakers. The genesis of the design started with one of the restaurant founders’ low-key obsession with this iconic footwear and their desire for the interiors to have the same bold offbeat vibe. This translated into an interior not unlike a tripped-out oversized game of Tetris, with voluminous structures and implied lines of energy at play. Walls form huge boxy geometries over 16 feet tall. These boxes appear to be sliding past one another in the void of deep space. Huge solid white and teal boxes house the restaurant’s kitchen and restrooms. An enormous translucent iridescent box encompasses the entire dining area and becomes the focal point of the experience. This large volume is a custom installation made of a slender raw steel frame and dichroic color-changing acrylic panels. These panels cast multi-hued reflections across the space, blurring the interior to exterior relationship, and morphing as the light changes throughout the day and night. Visitors can dine within and walk around this volume, delighting in the mercurial rainbow quality of the material. The overall effect is sharp, clean, post-modern, and psychedelic - unlike any chicken restaurant you've ever encountered.