The Day of the Dead is every day at Hueso. Part crypt, part Joseph Cornell–style assemblage, the concept restaurant (whose name means "bone") is an artfully spooky collaboration between chef-provocateur Alfonso Cadena and his architect brother Ignacio of Cadena & Asiocados. Ignacio stripped the interior and, with the help of local artists, covered it with a collage of skeletal fragments. Located in the Lafayette Design District of Guadalajara, Mexico, the canteen occupies a resurrected 1940s structure, formerly the home/studio of architect Diaz Morales and now part of the Luis Barragán Foundation—and itself equally eye opening.
Photography by Jaime Navarro via Architizer, unless otherwise noted.
Above: Eucalyptus provides a sign of life in the chalky white dining room where everything from human and animal bones to molcajetes (mortar and pestles) are part of the fossilized display.
Above: A stepped communal table extends the length of the 240-square-foot space, surrounded by classic Thonet hairpin chairs. The white tiles on the floor are a continuation of the exterior of the building (see below).
Above: The whitewashed walls are an ode to the elemental, and include, according to Ignacio, 10,000 bones organized in a grid of wooden frames and shadowboxes.
Above L: Chef Alfonso Cadena, 29, grew up in Mexico City and got his training at the Culinary Institute of America. Above R: An aluminum backbone holds the orders of the day. Photographs via Yatzer.
Above: The long, narrow room has a bleached bar table (right) and the kitchen opens behind it. Photograph via Designboom
Above: In the chapel-like back of the room, a dead tree rises and casts interesting shadows. Photograph via Designboom
Above: Cooking implements and a bucket of bones adorn the area around stairs.
Above: In the entry, a display case is filled with aluminum castings of ribs, vertebrae, and other fragments.
Above: The 1940s building is covered in "a skin" of ceramic tiles decorated with stitching patterns. That's a bone hanging over the door.
Above: Hueso is in Guadalaja's Lafayette District, at 2061 Efraín González Luna.
Kindred spirit? Take a look at Bones, a gastropub in Paris.
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