Restaurant · Bhubaneswar, Odisha · Concept design

Legends Bistro

Type: Restaurant & bar
Location: Bhubaneswar, Odisha
Size: 2,500 sq ft · 95 covers
Status: Concept — unbuilt

A biker café designed for a highway plot in Bhubaneswar, sharing its campus with a Harley-Davidson dealership — ninety-five covers under a new timber-trussed roof cut open to the sky, with an aircraft propeller on the wall. It was never built.

The idea

People aspire to be legends. Success makes them that — respected, celebrated, a cult of their own. The brief was for a place that inspires you, that makes you think outside the boundaries you were given. Somewhere to be free, and unwind.

So the room names its legends outright. The columns carry them in stencil — Burt Munro, who took a modified Indian to a land-speed record at sixty-eight; Amelia Earhart; Maharaja Jai Singh — and the wall behind the seating answers the obvious objection: “What if I fall?” Oh, but darling, what if you fly.

It stayed a concept. The site was damaged by the storm before construction got going, and the project stopped there. What follows is the scheme as it was drawn.

Why a biker café

The client asked for a simple biker café, and the site had already said the same thing. A raw concrete shell on the highway, sharing a campus with a Harley-Davidson dealership — and the dealership’s own office was to sit on the mazzanine above the bar backdrop, reached by a retractable stair. The building already belonged to the tribe the brief was chasing.

The propeller on the mural wall is where that lands. Not a motorcycle on a plinth, but the thing the whole idea is actually about — going faster than anyone thought you could, in the wrong machine.

The plan

Ninety-five covers on 2,500 square feet, with six hundred given to the kitchen at the head of the room. The bar runs beneath it with six stools; booth seating fills the centre in two long rows; banquettes line the right-hand wall and the stage lifts two hundred millimetres into the far corner. The toilets sit in the same campus but outside the plot, and the porch was held clear for a future expansion.

The audience was never the passing trade — it was private groups throwing parties, and small events for the colleges nearby. Hence the stage, and hence the lamps: oversized shades on brass stems, set down the middle of the room to break the seating into rooms within a room.

The roof does the work

The existing shell was dark and low. Trusses were introduced to lift the ceiling and the roof was opened with glazed panels to get daylight deep into it — outer roof in galvanised iron with glass, inner roof in truss with MS purlins and rafters clad in wooden laminate. Coloured sun films temper the skylights, a layer of mineral wool under the iron sheets cuts the heat gain, and MS bars hung off the roof carry the track lighting. The sides are filled with cement board finished in primer and a patina texture.

Behind the stage sits a light box — a backdrop when someone is playing, and a frame for the logo when nobody is.