Located in Santa Fe, Mexico City’s most modern district teeming with gleaming glass and steel office towers, Tori Tori Santa Fe is the eponymous Japanese eatery’s fifth outpost in the city. Local cross-disciplinary design practice Esrawe Studio drew inspiration from Samurai armours and Japanese writing characters, marrying Japanese craftsmanship with geometric abstraction to create a space that is squarely contemporary and rather austere, and yet subtly poetic.

Situated on the ground floor of a commercial building, the vast, 720-square-metre venue, which also includes a “grab-and-go” shop with Japanese food and snacks, is swathed from floor to ceiling in a monochrome palette of black hues. The dark interiors are punctuated by holm oak custom-made furniture, which the Studio also designed, and other holm oak details, the most impressive of which are two suspended monumental structures whose design evokes the geometrical structure of traditional Samurai armours.

The two wooden structures were designed to take advantage of the double-height ceiling on the front and back of the venue. The cylindrical design, at the back, is suspended above the restaurant’s main teppanyaki table, where the food is cooked on iron plates in front of the guests, and hides the necessary extraction hood, while its rectilinear counterpart is the focal point of the shop in the front. Free-standing wooden shelving that the Studio also designed is used to separate the shopping area from the sushi bar that runs alongside it, while a wall of bas-relief geometric forms inspired from Kanji characters (a system of Japanese writing using Chinese characters) that runs the length of the space creates a decorative backdrop.

Despite the monochromatic black colour palette, the restaurant, which also includes a terrace with additional teppanyaki tables and a private dining room, enjoys plenty of daylight, courtesy of the floor-to-ceiling glazing, while come night time concealed lighting creates a more intimate ambience. Day or night, the masterfully illuminated suspended structures remain the focal points of this innovatively sophisticated venue.