Its only exterior signage consists of a slim neon arrow pointing down to its door, so finding Raleigh’s newest cutting-edge restaurant and lounge requires a position on the town’s inside track.
“I like to do places that aren’t blaring at you,” says entrepreneur Souheil Al-Awar, who opened Clockwork earlier this year. “If you know, you know.”
And if you don’t, you don’t. But if you happen to walk by its storefront on West North Street near Glenwood, chances are you’ll notice the garage door – wide open, beckoning and merging outside with in.
“I’ve always felt that if I do something design-wise, people will come,” the 1990 graduate of N.C. State’s College of Design says. “People have choices – and if I can get them into the door with food or drink or music that they love, they’ll keep coming back.”
They might do that for Clockwork’s 1970s Moorish interiors alone. Al-Awar grew up in Beirut during that time period, and he’s drawing heavily on memory here, as well as on James Bond’s Dr. No and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. All the while, his palette reaches into the deepest and richest of colors: magentas, fuchsias, purples and muted golds.
“When we go out, we want to feel something different – we want to be visually and mentally stimulated by all of our senses, including food, drink and music,” he says. “You have to make them all come together. Here the design is a major element but not the only element.”
Indeed. Like Gerald Murphy mingling “the juice of a few flowers” on the Riviera in the 1920s, Al-Awar is not averse to making up a cocktail or two, like the South American/Lebanese drink he calls Bliss, Oh Bliss. It’s Caribbean rum with an imported Lebanese orange blossom water called Mazahel.
“It’s an extract from the flowers,” he says.
Clockwork’s menu is equally divergent, serving dishes based on his travels to Lebanon, Italy, Venezuela and Mexico. “The cuisine is schizophrenic,” he says. “It’s different things from different places.”
He may not advertise any of it too much, but then again, maybe he doesn’t need to.
“We want to bring you in here and keep you here,” he says. “We want to make you feel like you want to come in.”
So who needs signage for that?
For more information, go to http://www.clockworkraleigh.com/
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