Fast Casual · Astoria, Queens · Completed
Slappin
Chick
A compact restaurant where brand identity, customer flow, and food-service operations are designed as one system.
A compact restaurant where brand identity, customer flow, and food-service operations are designed as one system.
Paper Plane Architecture organized the restaurant around the essential sequence of a fast-casual operation: arrival, ordering, pickup, dining, production, and support.
The ground floor combines customer seating, the ordering and pickup station, restroom facilities, and a full commercial kitchen. Prep and support functions continue at the cellar level, protecting valuable space above for customers and food production.
The visual identity makes the restaurant memorable. The planning makes it perform.
The service counter acts as the organizing element of the ground floor. Ordering, payment, pickup, beverage service, and kitchen access are concentrated into one compact operational zone.
The result is a clear customer sequence that minimizes unnecessary movement while keeping the dining area open and easy to understand.
The interior uses a deliberately limited palette—black ribbed wall panels, diamond-plate metal, dark millwork, warm wood-look flooring, and yellow lighting—to create a consistent backdrop for signage and menu graphics. Overhead, layered ceiling bands and continuous perimeter lighting give the narrow space a stronger sense of depth and rhythm.
The commercial kitchen coordinates cooking equipment, exhaust, refrigeration, prep surfaces, sanitation, storage, and staff circulation within a tight back-of-house footprint. Its relationship to the ordering and pickup area is central to the efficiency of the restaurant.
The cellar accommodates additional preparation and support functions, reducing pressure on the main floor and allowing the ground level to remain focused on customer service, seating, cooking, and circulation.
Bold signage, illuminated graphics, and a strong black-and-yellow palette carry the restaurant’s interior character directly to the sidewalk, giving the storefront an immediate presence within its Astoria streetscape.
The completed restaurant balances customer experience with the technical demands of a commercial food-service operation—from the storefront and ordering counter to the kitchen, prep areas, and cellar support space.