Isidore + Nicosi

The Pearl Brewery’s new 40,000-sf Pullman Market celebrates the state’s culinary riches with a specialty grocer, a whole-animal butcher, artisanal retail, and eateries. Among the latter are Isidore and Nicosi, two distinct fine-dining establishments conceived as a single project sharing a kitchen, bathrooms, and back-of-house facilities. The central challenge was choreographing the flows of two simultaneous yet independent restaurants. Isidore embodies Pullman’s core promise: presenting the bounty of the borderland’s independent ranchers and farmers in its most refined form. Its architecture echoes the original 1920s shell, exposing exterior walls and concrete structure beneath a floating folded ceiling plane. The dessert bar Nicosi, by contrast, offers an insular, choreographed experience—restaurant as theatre. Recognizing that staff spend the most time there, the project considers the full spectrum of users—everyone from dishwasher to diner.

“While it is an interior renovation coupled with a bit of an adaptive reuse, there’s a clear theme that finds its way from the origins of the building, which is very rectilinear, through the final version of it. In addition, there’s a high level of control when it comes to a lot of the furnishings inside. When you’re inside the building, you don’t lose the character of the original structure—you’re literally adding onto it.”

—Germane Barnes, RA