Calgary has a long history of celebrating beautiful design-forward restaurants. While restaurant design has definitely come a long way over the last decade or so on a global level, our city has long been home to visionaries like Sal Howell (River Cafe, Deane House) and the late Witold Twardowski (Mescalero, Divino, and many others), who have created restaurants with rooms as appetizing as the food coming out of the kitchens. More recently, new Calgary restaurants have developed a bit of a signature “look,” often spearheaded by the Concorde Entertainment Group and its regular partner in design Frank Architecture (Major Tom, Bridgette Bar, etc).
Now there’s a new firm in town called Way of Normal looking to make its mark on how restaurants look and feel. Way of Normal has only been around for about a year, but principal designer Landon Anholt was shaping the design of local restaurants for many years with firms Fort Architecture and McKinley Burkart before branching off to create his new company, with designers Joel Riep and Adrienne Cunningham joining the team. The idea was to create a firm that doesn’t just take on restaurant clients but intentionally specializes in food and beverage venue design.
Anholt says he’s always been drawn to the energy of restaurants, dreaming of becoming both a designer and a chef when he was in high school. In addition to designing the overall look of a room, Way of Normal and its sister company Good Spoils take care of the fine details .
