Architecture: What have they cooked up for us now?: How much do architects contribute to the success or failure of contemporary restaurants? As an exhibition opens in London, Emily Green reports

According to the curator Alicia Pivaro, only eight weeks of research went into 'Tasty - Good Enough to Eat', an exhibition dedicated to restaurant design that opens tomorrow at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) in London. But her admission begs the question: why so much time?

Once the title had been lifted from a dictionary of cliches, all she needed to do was round up photographs, shoot a few others and ask a quickly assembled list of architects, restaurateurs and food biz types to write short essays, essentially praising themselves. Unsurprisingly, they obliged.

Yet this offhand show is oddly appropriate for an industry where low pay and punishing deadlines make mincemeat of standards. The life is so tough that often the design of a restaurant is the only thing to report for duty without a hangover.

The hip black and orange catalogue that accompanies the exhibition has a distinct 'the dog ate my homework' quality about it. In it Pivaro writes: 'After the 1980s credit-fuelled boom in restaurants, the 1990s has produced a rich diversity of new trends which this exhibition represents.' Pure waffle. 'Tasty' is concerned solely with restaurants aimed at the fashionable young and ageing trendies in London, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow.

Nor are the 28 restaurants Pivaro chooses rooted in any sort of new movement occasioned by the Nineties. While most may have been launched (or relaunched) in this decade, their style and attitude is pure 1987, when the designer Ben Kelly created Dry 201 in Manchester, the super-cool bar that generated, well, even more super-cool bars. In the same year, the Modernist architect Julyan Wickham completed the west London brasserie Kensington Place.

The sheer size of Kensington Place changed eating habits (it started barn-like enough with 80 seats, then was enlarged to 135 in 1992). Throughout the Eighties, British architects and chefs had been asking themselves why London so lacked Continental panache, particularly that of the huge Parisian brasseries: here it was.

Granted, modern restaurants had been around before Kensington Place (some designed by Wickham), but they tended to be cool and clubby. Tchaik Chassay had turned the London wine bar 192 into a beguilingly louche media hole. Rick Mather had pioneered the white-white look of the Zen chain of Chinese restaurants. Peter Muller gave Alastair Little's Soho restaurant Scandinavian simplicity. John Pawson had been the minimalist's minimalist with the ascetic Japanese restaurant Wakaba.

Wickham, by contrast, was the architect who wanted to have fun. One cannot divide the man from the spaces he creates. He is gregarious, with a visible capability for bliss (ah, life] ah, martinis]). Only Wickham, the extrovert, would have, through the use of so much glass, set customers and passers-by on display.

This fishtank, cut out of the side of a dirty Sixties office block, shook new life and fresh glamour into restaurant design. It was lean but playful: waiters' stations concealing pillars spiralled like propellors on a ridiculous space ship. But then, good Modernism was always fond of a joke and boyishly preoccupied with flying saucers and rocket ships.

From the moment Kensington Place opened, the restaurant world's burning issue became noise. Wickham's din was deliberate. No piped music or politely bored pianist for him, thank you.

If there is a common strain running through the Riba show, it is a Wickham- style goading of the public to live a little and let loose a lot. To put themselves on show. This would only happen, even in the chic heart of London, if eating out became workaday, and that would only follow if prices dropped. Well before the recession, Kensington Place did force prices down at the top end of the market.

Restaurateurs who followed its lead in the Nineties are wont to claim they lowered prices out of some sort of public- spiritedness. Doubtful. They, too, simply wanted restaurant-as-happening. For some, this took having a theme: say, popularising Japanese ramen bars in the case of Wagamama, a fashionable underground room near the British Museum where throngs of chattersome art students slurp noodles at refectory tables, or promoting Belgian beers, as is the catch of the weird Camden Town mussels-and- chips restaurant, Belgo. Ever lavish, Sir Terence Conran decided to do Quaglino's in the manner of a Noel Coward set. And central London's latest hip restaurant, Alfred, dresses up to dress down as an English working man's caff.

Alongside this artful approach to design, a DIY movement has grown up among young renegades. Michael Belben and David Eyre scraped out a Farringdon pub, The Eagle, slapped in a grill, an inefficient extractor, hired notably pretty cooks and arrived at a popular working anarchy. A rudimentary conversion of a fire station into the 'Fire Station' brasserie alongside Waterloo railway station last year had a rock 'n' roll quality, raising the kitchen on a stage.

The Riba show does not appear to know restaurants, but it knows what it likes. It even unknowingly includes architectural accidents: the Fire Station's owners, originally bent on a theme restaurant, were unable to fit an American railway dining car through the doors. A chef suggested tables and chairs instead . . .

'Tasty - Good Enough to Eat' opens tomorrow at Gallery 2, Riba, 66 Portland Place, London W1 (071-580 5533).

(Photograph omitted)