What Makes a Restaurant Truly Sexy: Lighting, Color, and a Killer Playlist | Eater

"At the French restaurant where love is literally in the name, lighting is described as the most essential element: Fuks says, "If you have the right lighting, you can make any space work," and he adds, "I see so many beautiful restaurants with terrible lighting. That completely destroys the experience. It doesn’t matter how amazing the restaurant is, if you have this ugly white LED light on top of the table, I just want to leave." He notes the challenge posed by a 2024 California law that restricts the sale of incandescent bulbs in favor of LEDs, and while there are "all sorts of expensive LED lighting set-ups that can be controlled by phone apps," he prefers to keep it "old-school," using "luxe gold candlesticks with lit candles placed atop each table," and hunting down warm lightbulbs that can be manually dimmed as afternoon shifts into evening. On color and mood he says, "I’m a spiritual person, and green is actually the color of the heart chakra, so we wanted it to be prominent," and he emphasizes that "green is really the color of love." For music he blends French love songs with more upbeat ’70s disco and admits, "We kind of struggled with the music at first," explaining, "It took a while to figure out how to make the music speak to the crowd. You have to mix the upbeat songs and the romantic songs so that you can appeal to everybody." He and his wife Abbie spent two years painstakingly choosing every single detail there, underscoring that much of the restaurant’s intimacy comes from the owners’ personal touches." - Amy McCarthy