Dinner With Designer (DWD): Alder x Jennifer Carpenter

In the (not-so) gritty East Village, a sunny yellow door and shingle-style cladding beckon you into Alder, a new casual restaurant-pub by Wylie Dufresne, of wd~50 fame. Inside, the menu and the design wink strongly to the north, specifically to Cape Cod, where Dufresne spent his summers as a child. Of course this being NY, and Dufresne and executive chef Jon Bignelli being wunderkinds, classic American and New England fare has been creatively reinterpreted: Pigs in a blanket are filled with Chinese sausage; New England clam chowder comes with oyster crackers that are actual oysters, fried; fish & chips are generously heaped & tastefully presented on a slate slab.

Fish & Chips

Clam Chowder with Oyster Crackers

Pigs in a Blanket

The design, by Jennifer Carpenter Architect, is equally comfortable and familiar yet inventive. This was the first restaurant job for Carpenter, who incidentally is a sister of Dufresne's wife, Maile, although she's a seasoned architect with a successful portfolio of retail and residential projects. Her main move was the ceiling: a series of fins made of wood repurposed from a fence from, yes, Cape Cod. What could just be regular rustic appears minimalist and contemporary, thanks to each fin being strung on a blackened-steel rod, then canted at 1 of 12 different angles, creating a subtle rhythm. Wood appears elsewhere—the floor, the chairs, the banquette—yet ironically none of it is alder wood. Carpenter pays tribute to the wood at the entry door, its forged-bronze handle sporting indentations like an alder branch.

Entry with alder-like bronze handle

 Ceiling fins

 Menu