Americas Post Oak

Houston, Texas
Magical realist architecture… JMA collaborated with Chef Michael Cordua to create Americas, a theater to present his fusion of pan-South American dishes and European techniques, winning accolades from the James Beard Foundation.

Esquire Magazine’s John Marini named it Restaurant of the Year, commenting, “ It may well start
another revolution in the way we look at American dining.” It was the first of several collaborations
between JMA and Cordua Restaurants exploring the layered cultures of the Americas.

JMA was commissioned by Michael Cordua to design Americas as they were putting the finishing touches on Tempest, a restaurant club in Houston inspired by Shakespeare’s play, and just after
the completion of the Cypress Club in San Francisco, a project pursuing / an inquiry/ scrutinizing / an American architecture consistent with the emerging and vital California food and wine innovations which captured the culinary world’s imagination.

Americas Restaurant Post Oak, Houston opened in early 1993.

JMA was commissioned by Michael Cordua to design Americas as they were putting the finishing touches on Tempest, a restaurant club in Houston inspired by Shakespeare’s play, and just after the completion of the Cypress Club in San Francisco, a project pursuing / an inquiry/ scrutinizing / an American architecture consistent with the emerging and vital California food and wine innovations which captured the culinary world’s imagination.

JMA asked, “what environment would be appropriate to reinforce Cordua’s ultra-contemporary North American interpretations of traditional South American dishes composed with ingredients indigenous to the Americas and fused with European techniques”? 

JMA: informed by the groundbreaking South American literary movements created by Jorge Luis Borges and the Magical realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and studies of South American culture. 

We had just completed a collaboration with a San Francisco restaurateur whose menu was built upon the emergent California Freestyle approach to creating cross-culturally influenced dishes composed of seasonal, regional ingredients and paired with local California wines. Traditional San Francisco dishes took on Asian and Mexican inflections, new American food, a challenge to the Nouvelle Cuisine.

Michael Cordua changed our ideas about what “American” meant. He offered up dishes which appeared to be fettuccinibut in fact the noodles were strips of corn tortillas: corn was the grain of the Americas, not wheat, and that the green revolution of the Americas was built upon the success of milpas, agricultural inventions where corn, beans and squash and other foodstuffs were grown together.

We were inspired by the prose of Jorge Luis Borges and the Magical Realism of Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez and images from National Geographic. At Tempest, the architecture was immersive theater. At Americas the architecture became a riff on Magical Realism. 

And he pushed us to match his wildly creative and fearless approach to mixing the foodstuffs of the Americas with the techniques of Europe with our design, encouraging us toward poetic abstraction and pushing us to embrace our gringo fantasies about the Americas. We created a terraced room populated by crystalized trees dripping flower chandeliers of spun copper and hand blown glass, booths like leaves, a dining area suspended above a canyon opening, woven walls symbolizing the integration of the indigenous Americans with Europeans and African immigrants.