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From the boys that brought us one of our favourite Sydney restaurants, The Apollo, comes their latest joint venture, Cho Cho San on Macleay Street in Sydney’s Potts Point. The design references a material palette consistent with contemporary Japanese architecture – think concrete, birch ply, white paint and brass highlights. The space, designed by George Livissianis, is infused with a Japanese sensibility & simplicity in detailing. “This was a fundamental consideration when designing a Japanese influenced dining/bar room – to achieve a Japanese spirit & feeling without using any iconography or thematic/kitsch references,” says George Livissianis. 

The entire ceiling is a stretched material (Barrisol) that is back-lit to create a natural glow to the room. Once dimmed, the ceiling provides glorious light quality which is almost not recognisable as a light source. This was a critical component in the design as a response to what was a cavernous, dark room. The simplicity of the room is also maintained by concealing the services, a/c and audio behind the perforated panels which primarily function as acoustic absorbers. This was essential to control the acoustic comfort within the space and to preserve the material palette of concrete and white washed brick walls. “The design responds instinctively to the space we inherited – the long, disjointed dining room, the limited street access through the side door and the lack of street presence. We wanted to give the space life & texture and connect the rooms with a very simple element.”

This interior is deceivingly simple, at the same time managing to resolve a set of complex issues in an elegant and beautiful way. A real triumph. Bravo Geroge! Read on for a little Q&A with the man himself.

Related post: Interview // George Livissianis.

+ What was your design inspiration for this project – i.e was it a result of client’s brief, a particular concept or an idea etc?

The design responds to the site – its limitations and its strengths and was heavily influenced by the proportions of the dining room, the connection to the streetscape, the segmented nature of the room and its cave like appeal.

+ Your favourite thing about this project?

The shelf detail and the use of the concrete cone holes for bag hooks in the bar.

+ What did you learn during the process?

The whole process with this builder is an education – he’s such an experienced craftsmen that you learn everything from formwork to joinery detailing and everything in-between.

+ Would you have done anything differently?

Always – I think there is something about every project that under different circumstances may have had an alternative outcome.

[Images courtesy of George Livissianis. Photography by Tom Ferguson.]

The post ‘Cho Cho San’ Contemporary Japanese Restaurant by George Livissianis // Sydney. appeared first on Yellowtrace.

A couple of years ago, my friend Michelle turned me onto Simple Things in West Hollywood and it’s been really hard to stay away ever since.  They have these delicious little bite-size pies and the location is really convenient for a mid-day lunch when I am out prepping, but my real addiction is with their pretzel roll.  They serve a pulled chicken sandwich with chipotle barbecue sauce on the softest, most perfectly salty pretzel.  On Monday, we shot a picnic inspired post for Hayneedle (remember our first Hayneedle post?) and I was determined to try my hand at these little numbers.  (We made them into BATs– Brie, Avocado, + Turkey).  These pretzel rolls right out of the oven might just ruin you for normal bread!  I have already been thinking about all of the ways I can use them: bread bowls for soup, pretzel croutons– the options are endless!  Added bonus: Your whole house will smell like an Auntie Anne’s.

Pretzel Rolls

Yield: 14 small rolls or 8 large sandwich size rolls

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups warm water

2 tablespoons light brown sugar

1 package active dry yeast

5 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted

2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

4 cups bread flour (full disclosure, I used regular flour because I didn’t feel like running out to the store and they turned out great!)

1 tsp. canola oil

3 quarts water

3/4 cup baking soda

Coarse sea salt

Directions:

Spray 2 sheet pans liberally with non-stick cooking spray.

Combine the water, sugar, yeast, and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with the dough hook until combined. Let sit for 5 minutes.

Add the salt and flour and mix on low speed until combined. Increase the speed to medium and continue kneading until the dough is smooth and begins to pull away from the side of the bowl, about 3 to 4 minutes. If the dough appears too wet, add additional flour, 1 tablespoon at a time. Remove the dough from the bowl, place on a flat surface and knead into a ball with your hands.

 Oil a bowl with canola, add the dough and turn to coat with the oil. Cover with a clean towel or plastic wrap and place in a warm spot until the dough doubles in size, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Bring the water to a boil in a large pot over high heat and add the baking soda.

 Remove the dough from the bowl and place on a flat surface. Divide the dough into 8 or 14 equal pieces (depending on the size you would like) and roll each into an even ball. Place each piece onto the sheet pans.

Boil the rolls (or pretzels or pretzel bites) in the water/baking soda for 30 seconds each, moving around and splashing up onto the tops of the rolls. Remove from the solution and place back onto the baking sheets. Sprinkle the tops liberally with coarse sea salt and then cut an “x” into the tops of each roll. Bake in the preheated oven for 15-16 minutes, watching closely at the end so that they reach the desired brown color, but don’t burn.

Pretzel recipe adapted from Bobby Flay

Interval training, as we've mentioned before, is one of the most efficient ways to exercise. Yesterday we shared a routine that gives you a full-body workout with 12 exercises in 7 minutes. By request, here are videos that show how to do each of those exercises properly.

Read more...

- Stylish Bicycle Accessories for ladies.

- This week felt a lot like this.

- Musical Chairs, choosing the right seat.

- Throw Out Your Resume.

- For my German speaking readers: Der Spiegel Online wrote about my desk swap project.

- Refreshingly different: Diablo Toilet Roll Holder

- Really enjoyed this New York Times video piece: Navigating the Supermarket Aisles

- Pretty Cables. Yes! (via)

- Business or Pleasure? Try Both. Professional Conferences Double as Vacation Venues

- How to Transform Your Email into a Productivity Tool, by Jason Womack

- A creative commons flow chart.

- It’s a desk. It’s a bed. It made me look.

- In Lambert’s Cafe in Sikeston, MO, they just throw your bread to you from across the restaurant.

- Photos of White Men Wearing Google Glass

- USA TODAY did a feature on DUMBO, my office neighborhood.

- 9 of the Most Fascinating Abandoned Mansions from Around the World

- Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything by my studio mate Kio Stark is now available on Amazon.

- The History of Typography, an animated Short (via)

- Wanted: 25 special customers.

- Tattly is looking to hire a Community Manager and a Summer Design Intern.

- Clip Folding Table. Yes.

- Research confirms that, counterintuitively, relaxing makes you more productive.

- Team Behance is introducing the first 99U book: “Manage Your Day-to-Day”

- All kinds of touching: Steve Harvey meets the Florida couple that helped him before he became famous and successful

- Apple’s “All-Time Top Apps

“Anyone can complain, but people who provide solutions make a difference.” Barrett Garese

- Animated GIFs, I love you: Popcorn bomb.

“Make your own Tools!”
- Bruce Mau

From The Designer Says, by Sara Bader

“Go ahead and make something for the elites. Not the elites of class or wealth, but the elites of curiosity, passion and taste.”
- Seth Godin

You don’t have to pander, by Seth Godin

The Visual Compendium of Cameras is a meticulously illustrated catalog of 100 landmark cameras, culled from over a century of photographic history. A beauty.

(via explore)

NYU Local has covered plenty of productivity tools in the past, but we’ve been saving this one for the perfect moment. Since the author is finally nearing graduation, the opportunity to divulge all without risking four years of productive equality is finally here. Man, it feels good.

Our secret is text expansion, and once you perfect it your life will change forever. You’ll want to keep it a secret, afraid that you’ll lose your advantage in the job market, school, at the DJ booth, in the bedroom, at the zoo, etc. We speak in hyperbole all the time here at NYU Local, but please do not dismiss this one; we are serious as Black.

There are tons of programs and they all work similarly (and well). On Mac, aText and TypeIt4Me are bargains at $5; On Windows, try PhraseExpress. Whichever you chose, the process and features are one the same:

Basic shortcuts

How often do you type your name? How about your email address? Mailing address? Cell number? Your NYU ID? Do you really think we have entered the 21st century without some solution to this repetitive nonsense? With text expansion, you can pick a system-wide shortcut and associate that shortcut with styled or unstyled text. Your keystrokes are monitored constantly, so you could have “212–555–1234” inserted whenever you type “mycell” or your entire mailing address complete after just entering the street number (if it’s an uncommon number). The entire application is worth using just to be able to insert your email address with a few keystrokes (perhaps “ema”); it saves hours and hours in chat messages, login screens, signups, etc.

Dynamic shortcuts

But you ought to be able to do some tricky stuff, since it’s a computer and all. Plenty of dynamic data can be entered with a shortcut, like the current date (perhaps “tday”), the time, day of the week, whatever. You can even set a shortcut based on date calcualations, so “nweek” inserts the date for 7 days into the future.

Special shortcuts

Here’s where you can show off. Text expansion apps use several strings that correspond to extra special behaviors, which are incredibly useful for your average abusive internship. Let’s say you often find yourself typing the sentence “Hello [name of Serbian prince], we have received your gold.” Things can get pretty timely if you’re copy-pasting that sentence, then copying some huge name with lots of consonants in a row, highlighting, blinking, clicking. If you made a shortcut for that sentence and added a special clipboard symbol where the prince’s name would appear, you can just copy the name and type the shortcut to release the sentence automatically filled with the name as it appears on your clipboard. Crazy.

If you write lots of emails with “Hi [name],” as a starter, there’s no point using the clipboard solution. Instead, you can configure the shortcut to move the cursor to just before the comma after insertion. That way, after you type your greeting shortcut, all you have to do is enter a name.

You can also include many non-text keys (e.g. tab, backspace) as part of your shortcut, which can make filling forms and completing repeated actions amazingly simple. As you get comfortable creating shortcuts, you may find that tweaking these makes the software more accurate for your uses.

Code shortcuts

If you work with code in any way, using a built-in library of code shortcuts or writing your own can be a huge time saver. For example, you could use a shortcut to automatically insert an opening and closing h1 tag, with the cursor positioned in between. If you’d rather run code, you can do that too.

Everything else

Since text expansion is really just an unlimited clipboard, most things that you can copy can be pasted with a shortcut. Special characters like €♥º™ may have hard-to-remember keyboard keystrokes, but with text expansion you can make up your own. Same deal with Apple’s exhaustive library of Japanese emoji, which is time-consuming to insert on the desktop.

If you suck at spelling or often find yourself making a particular mistake, text expansion can help. Create a shortcut for “judgement” that automatically corrects to the preferred spelling “judgment,” for example. You could conceivably write an entire paper with shortcuts, so do put some thought into your phrases.

And yes, we used text expansion to write this article. But you’d never know. Muahaha!

Image by author

“It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.”
- Thomas Keller

(via Kottke)

“Because a true sense of purpose is deeply emotional, it serves as a compass to guide us to act in a way completely consistent with our values and beliefs. Purpose does not need to involve calculations or numbers. Purpose is about the quality of life. Purpose is human, not economic.”
- Simon Sinek

Purpose can not be rationalized, by Simon Sinek.

A few months ago, Shulie, from the beautiful blog, Food Wanderings, asked me to write a post for her Baking with Heritage series.  I couldn’t have been more flattered, not to mention excited, since this would allow me to journey back to my childhood in my grandmother’s kitchen, where she taught me to make challah from an old family recipe.  This recipe was taught to her by her mother, who in turn learned it from her mother in Russia, who learned it from her mother in Russia. and so on and so forth  - a precious family heirloom that is dear to my heart, and to me, the most perfect challah.

I rarely sway from this recipe, but in this case, my creative side overruled my traditional side, so this round, Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Cinnamon Swirl Challah Twist was born.

Before I link you to my post, along with the recipe, a few things I need to touch on, totally unrelated to challah, but I wanted to update you and failed to do so in my last post.

First off, I finally moved to my own domain about a month ago.  See the URL on top?  I’m no longer wordpress.com, I’m just .com, parsleysagesweet.com.  I haven’t decided where I’m going regarding a new design, but, for now, I’m just happy with my new digs.  I bought a a url auto-direct, so you don’t (I hope) have to change anything or subscribe again, but, if there’s any problems, please let me know.  I’ve installed a neat little contact form, which you can access from the page options below the header. where it says; CONTACT ME.

Should I just change it to CONTACT?  Is ‘ME’ really necessary?  The things I ponder…

Also, none of my ‘likes’ or share numbers were able to be transferred, so, sadly, it’s a  clean slate – like I’m brand new.  For those of you who ‘liked’ my posts here and/or shared my posts via Pinterest, Twitter etc..thank you!

Secondly, I finished the Bad Boy First Love story, but it had to be split into two parts because it’s just way too long. Part 20 will be up this coming Monday, April 8th, 2013.  I accidentally published it yesterday, so you probably received an email or saw it in your reader.  The link won’t work because, after posting it, I was informed that my Secret Recipe Club reveal post, in which the next installment of Bad Boy First Love is a part of..is supposed to go up next Monday – so I had to take it down. BUT – for those of you who read it..I’m adding a lot more to it since I have almost a week to do so.

Having said all that, I’m sorry it’s been so long in between parts, but I experienced the worst case of writers block I’ve ever had, plus some health issues.

To get the recipe and read about this sweet challah, loaded with pockets of vanilla bean infused brown butter and cinnamon sugar goo, head on over to this page on Shulie’s blog, Food Wanderings! While you’re there, take a stroll through her posts – there’s so much to love about her blog, from her beautiful recipes and photos to her brilliant writing!

I’m submitting this challah to Yeastspotting..a weekly bread baking showcase hosted by the talented Susan of Wild Yeast.