Completed project
NAMA Omakase: suspended rings over a brick counter
An omakase restaurant in Montreal, where every detail of the plate is obsessed over and the lighting could not be any less. We took two icons of the EVA collection and remade them to measure.
The project in three lines
Where precision is everything, light cannot be approximate
The NAMA Omakase in Montreal is not just a restaurant: it is a room where the chef works in front of you and every gesture is seen. In a place like that light has two jobs that usually fight each other: lighting the counter like a workbench and keeping the room in half-light.
To answer the interior we chose two icons of our EVA collection — R2 Nefertiti and R3 Cleopatra — and we did not simply supply them.
Finishes, sizes and wiring were recalibrated one by one to fit the design: the rings become suspended jewels that talk to the architecture instead of sitting on top of it.
Fitted by hand, in a finished room
A suspended ring of that diameter is not carried up the stairs: it is assembled on site, piece by piece, from towers, inside a room where the floor and the brickwork are already done.
It is the part of the job nobody photographs and that decides everything: the exact height of each ring above the counter, because ten centimetres lower and the chef has the light in his eyes.
Two ways of looking at the same room
Photographs of the place, not renderings.
The evening, which is the moment that counts
An omakase happens at night: the light from the rings has to be enough for the plate without flattening the room, and without shadowing whoever stands behind the counter.
Light on the counter, not in the eyes
The rings sit above the counter and throw light downward: the chef works with light on the cut, and whoever sits opposite has no source in their eyes.
A collection piece, remade to your measurements
Finishes, diameters, heights and wiring are recalibrated around the project: it is the same lamp and it is not the same lamp.