By Christy Marshall
Photograph by Katherine Bish
Designing the Pan-Latin restaurant Wapango presented muchos challenges—for starters, that name. It’s based on huapango, a Mexican folk dance, but as the architects Peter Tao and Helen Lee (of Tao + Lee Associates) noted, no one would know how to say it, much less spell it, so they opted for the “Hooked on Phonics” version.
Second, the restaurant is attached to a shopping mall—but then again, not. You can’t just eat your cochinita pibil and walk through a doorway to shop, but you can eat, march outside, make a couple of quick right turns and find yourself in Chesterfield Mall.
Then, because Wapango is both a new restaurant and the prototype for a chain, the décor had to be both memorable and budget-conscious.
Finally, there’s that next-door neighbor: the Cheesecake Factory, with its four-story Moorish towers and overwrought exterior. How in the name of paella do you compete with that?
Carefully. Cleverly. To the exterior Tao and Lee added copper panels and (with an assist from designer Randy Burkett) played with lights. Along the sidewalk, huge illuminated steel spheres were installed. Ever-changing LEDs that flash “Wapango” hang over the door. Colored light boxes are stuck on the façade.
“Rather than a ‘My sign is bigger than your sign’ kind of approach, we convinced the client that we would use the façade with lights in it as if it were a sign,” Tao says. “You can see the lights from the highway.”
Inside, Wapango is broken into several zones (private dining room, bar, booths, elevated party level) and painted in a rainbow of margarita hues: pumpkin, papaya, mango, turquoise, red. “We knew it was a Pan-Latin restaurant, so we picked from the top Latin colors,” Lee says. The floors are concrete; the stylized Studio Lilica light fixtures are made of nylon.
Over the years, Tao and Lee (who are married) have created the designs for Crazy Bowls & Wraps, Trattoria Marcella’s addition, BARcelona and Boogaloo, among others, but at Wapango they started with a clean slate: no menu, no name, no logo. “That was what made it fun,” says Tao, “but it was a long, drawn-out process.”
And a challenging one.
Westfield Chesterfield Mall, 636-536-1151, wapango.com. Hours: 11 a.m.–10 p.m. daily.
