Âpé Yakitori Bar attempts to provide authenticity to a standardised, early 2000’s tenancy shell, a prevalent and often challenging typology that today dominates our cities.

Yakitori, literally translated as grilled bird, remains one of the most traditional and efficient practices of cooking. Each individual part of the chicken, or animal, or vegetable (in its modern interpretation) is utilised, from the heart to the thigh, liver and neck. It is the act of deconstruction to base constituent parts without wastage.

Âpé, which is ancient Ainu Japanese for fire, is a design predicated around base, constituent elements, that are carbon neutral or negative, set within a glowing sodium orange setting, a nod to the heart of a traditional Ainu Japanese home, the hearth, and the glow of sodium lights along the harbour of Newcastle.

Having worked with this client on previous projects, such as SUSURU, we were afforded the opportunity to control all capital within the project. To that end, our specification for the project became a funding mechanism to support early-stage, innovative material fabricators creating carbon negative materials. The wealth of the project was channeled into companies developing or supplying materials that exist as part of bioremediation, carbon sequestration, and/or the circular economy.