Anna Mae - Beau Rivage

Biloxi, Mississippi

Anna Mae is a 5,500 square foot Japanese fusion restaurant at Beau Rivage Resort Hotel (part of MGM/Mirage) in Biloxi, Mississippi. It's design plays on images from Japanese and American popular culture, blending imagery from Japanese Anime artwork featuring hyper stylized characters with enormous eyes and ‘Anna Mae’, a heartbreaker from a Mississippi Muddy Waters ballad.

Beside the host is an Anna Mae floor lamp, created using digital milling technology and old world glass fusing and glass slumping techniques. She is 5’6”, willowy and bright, animated and electrified …She is inspired by the willow, which, in Japanese gardens, represents the female life force. Her name is a variation on the bright Japanese Anime characters and the Anna Mae breaking Muddy Water’s heart in the blues song, “Anna Mae’s a good girl, but she love to run around at night....If I can get her mind on me, I know she’ll treat me right…”

Down the center of the dining room are pendant lamps, smiling abstractions of traditional Japanese Shinto temple bells, gold inside and highly-polished magnesium-aluminum outside. An oxidized- copper terrace overlooks the sushi bar.

Light fixtures of slumped art-glass drip over seating illuminating portraits of Anna Mae are on the back wall. The floor is bamboo, stained the color of chocolate.The chairs and booths are fabricated in hand carved maple, cast magnesium-aluminum alloy and upholstered seats and backs.

Between cozy booths at the edge of the dining room are twisting bronze sculptures inspired by Japanese willows, illuminated from above by silk interpretations of Chinese paper lanterns; table tops are solid ribbon-striped mahogany.