Forty Licks

Forty Licks is a subterranean Vietnamese restaurant set beneath central Sydney, and its handling of materials sets it apart from anything else in the CBD. GSBN Studio took a prosthetic approach to the historic building, a method that allows radical transformation while leaving the heritage fabric intact. The new framework is built from hand-welded stainless steel mesh and custom clamps, so the whole intervention can be removed at any time. Rather than touching the period columns, beams and walls, it inverts the site's untouchable character, keeps a clear visual link to the original structure, and gives the three-dimensional design something to feed off.

The concept pieces together contrasting parts of the Vietnamese landscape, setting the calm of rice paddies and mountains against the grit and chaos of the city. Those two themes shaped both the seating and the material palette. To seat the number of patrons set out in the brief, the design works every part of the 240 m² floor. Tiered platforms lift the seating onto an existing concrete plinth in a pattern that echoes Vietnamese rice paddies, alongside informal standing and seated bar areas. The zones are stitched back together with rattan, a native climbing palm, woven through the new mesh to recall the tangle of power cables strung across Vietnamese streets.

At the stairway entrance sits an artwork by Richard Goodwin, titled Prosthetic Apartment E, fabricated from stainless steel and rattan cane woven into a single fluid form. It acts as the cornucopia from which cane appears to flow like a drawing through the restaurant, and frames the project as a collaboration between art and architecture. The finished space is a subterranean world built to lift diners out of the commercial streetscape above into a fully immersive setting, completed in 2019 across a single below-ground level.

Architect: GSBN Studio. Lead designers: Henry Goodwin and Rob Scarfone. Photography: Alessandro Belgiorno-Nettis.