A sexy restaurant is one of those things that you can’t really put your finger on, but you know it when you see it. There’s a certain combination of factors — good lighting, a chic crowd, plush seats — that all adds up to a place that oozes sex appeal. But this mood is not the result of some ineffable je ne sais quoi, it’s the result of dozens of deliberate design choices that restaurant owners are making in order to create a space that feels cozy enough to canoodle with a new (or old!) flame.
There are a slew of considerations that a restaurant must make if it wants to cultivate the date-night vibe. The dining room can’t be too stuffy or pretentious, but must communicate just the right amount of glamour so that it feels sophisticated without being intimidating. The space itself — the service, the seating, even the color of the paint on the walls — play a role in making it feel distinctly welcoming to those who are looking for a space to share dinner with someone they love.
In Los Angeles, restaurateur Thomas Fuks, the mind behind popular date-night spots like Puzzle and Amour, is deeply familiar with what it takes to make a restaurant feel sexy. At the French restaurant Amour, where love is literally in the name, lighting is the most essential element in making a space feel intimate. “If you have the right lighting, you can make any space work,” Fuks says. “I see so many beautiful restaurants with terrible lighting. That completely destroys the experience. It doesn’t matter how amazing the restaurant is, if you have this ugly white LED light on top of the table, I just want to leave.”
Finding the right lighting has, in some respects, been a challenge at Fuks’s restaurants. The warm glow of an incandescent bulb is harder to find following the passage of a 2024 California law that restricts the sale of those bulbs, in favor of more environmentally friendly LEDs. He notes that there are all sorts of expensive LED lighting set-ups that can be controlled by phone apps, but says that he prefers to keep it “old-school.” That means luxe gold candlesticks with lit candles placed atop each table, and hunting down warm lightbulbs that can be manually dimmed as afternoon shifts into evening.
For Xavier Donnelly, the creative director at Ash Hotels, the hotelier behind the sultry cocktail lounge Bloom’s inside Baltimore’s Ulysses Hotel, lighting is equally paramount. From his perspective, the lighting in a space is there to highlight its unique architecture, sure, but there’s a more important purpose. “It should primarily be about making sure people are lit well and look hot,” Donnelly says. “To achieve that, the lighting needs to be dim, soft, warm, and at eye level. Strong overhead lighting casts unattractive shadows, and cooler lighting washes everyone out.”
The physical elements of the space — like paint, furniture, and art on the walls — must play nicely with the lighting to really nail a romantic vibe. Fuks gravitates toward saturated, rich colors for his restaurants — burgundy, lush green, and gold. “I’m a spiritual person, and green is actually the color of the heart chakra, so we wanted it to be prominent,” he says. “We could’ve done red at Amour, of course, but it’s just been done and redone, and people don’t know, but green is really the color of love.” Here, Fuks is referring to the ancient belief that the heart chakra is represented physically by the color green, meaning that there may be some kind of metaphysical romantic draw to a lush green dining room for date night.
At Justine’s, a decade-old French bistro in Austin, owners Justine Gilcrease and Pierre Pelegrin chose to go with classic bistro tables in part because of the inherent intimacy they provoke. “You want there to be a little chaos and spontaneity and closeness,” Gilcrease says. “You want the tables to be small and close together, that just makes a place feel sexier.” The walls, covered in chic art, and the live plants draping from the ceiling, add to that feeling of intimacy. Some might call Justine’s a little cramped, but Gilcrease views that literal closeness as playing a crucial role in making the space feel intimate.
Fuks, Gilcrease, and Donnelly also agree that a restaurant’s playlist also goes a long way in helping a restaurant exude a sensual air. Donnelly likes to keep it simple, with a baby grand piano tucked away in the corner playing the classics. Gilcrease’s restaurant takes a more lo-fi approach, with a massive record collection that runs the musical gamut from jazz standards to legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, and has grown so large that it’s taken over about half of the wine storage space at Justine’s. Fuks prefers to blend French love songs with more upbeat ’70s disco, in order to ensure that the atmosphere doesn’t start to feel too heavy or stuffy. “We kind of struggled with the music at first,” Fuks says. “It took a while to figure out how to make the music speak to the crowd. You have to mix the upbeat songs and the romantic songs so that you can appeal to everybody.”
As restaurateurs and designers settle on the right colors and lighting and playlists, they also have to be extremely careful to avoid the pitfalls of what makes a place feel distinctly un-sexy. Fuks hates stark LED lighting, and when she’s planning her own date nights, Gilcrease stays away from any spot that feels too generic or overly corporate. “You can feel that absence of personality,” she says. “You can just tell when a concept feels very planned-in-advance or someone was just hired to cultivate a specific vibe. The absence of that is such a turn-off.”
Above all, it seems like the creation of a sexy restaurant is, itself, an intimate pursuit. Gilcrease and Pelegrin are romantic partners, and their story is deeply woven into the fabric of Justine’s. The same goes for Fuks and his wife Abbie, who spent two years painstakingly choosing every single detail at Amour. “Whether or not you realize it, you are kind of absorbing our style and our inspirations by osmosis when you sit in our restaurant,” Gilcrease says. “The things people find sexy about this restaurant really extend beyond the physical property. It’s these aspects of what’s important to us and what we love that extend far beyond our design values.”
