Maya Congee Cafe, a small Asian cafe and grocery store in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, built a roadside outdoor dining space in 2021. Yumiko designed it after meeting the cafe owner Layla Chen through Design Corps, an online platform that connected restaurants, cafes, and bars with architects during the pandemic.
The space featured a simple timber frame with transparent red panels, inspired by the owner’s childhood memory of traditional Chinese buildings with arched gates (called paifang) to welcome the customers. Open benches that can be sat on from both the interior and street sides attracted passersby and customers alike. A half-opaque, half-translucent roof allowed customers to sit under comfortable light (either shaded or sunny) throughout the year.
Latticed walls on the short sides of the structure and white mesh with a printed logo on the backside were designed to comply with New York City’s requirement to make the structure open-air during the height of the pandemic. Over time, plants grew on the open shelves and created an even cozier environment that protected customers from busy car traffic.
In 2022, this project was selected as a participant in the Open Restaurants Innovation Workshop, organized by AIANY. A group of architects, advocates, and restaurateurs participated in this workshop and discussed the future of outdoor dining spaces in New York City. Yumiko presented a “prototype” of future outdoor dining spaces with teammates at the end of this workshop. Over a year later, some of those ideas from the workshop were adopted and the new outdoor dining program was announced by New York City.
Due to the high cost of the new program, the owner decided to take down the structure in 2024. An article on this project and my personal take on this new outdoor dining program were published as an Op-Ed submission by Yumiko in AIANY’s Oculus Magazine, Fall 2024 Issue.
PUBLICATION