Designer: Brand Gould, director of design and development

Owner: Steve Ells, CEO, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.

Year Opened: 1996 (4^th store in a chain of 80+)

Number of Seats: Dining Room, 55

FOH Square Footage: 1,119 sq.-ft.

BOH Square Footage: 1,227 sq.-ft

Service Styles: Quick service made-to-order

Menu Format: Custom made burritos and tacos

Chipotle Mexican Grill is a fast-growing chain of restaurants that serves fresh food fast. As of January 2000 there were 49 restaurants; 33 of these opened in 1999 after McDonald's purchased a 40 percent minority interest in the business.

The restaurants share a clean, contemporary look created by Chipotle director of design and development Brand Gould and his in-house design team. Although each is tailored to its location, they all sport such materials as corrugated metal, birch veneer plywood, glass, and exposed elements like steel piping and ductwork. "We use a common vocabulary of design elements that are orchestrated differently in each space we go into," says Brand. CEO Steve Ells has been reported as saying that design is one of the chain's key selling points.

Alameda & Logan in Denver

Asked to identify which restaurant best exemplified the Chipotle design esthetic, Gould picked unit #4, located in an urban neighborhood of residences and businesses. When asked about the design, he first begins to describe how the food is prepared and served. Customers place their orders at a tortilla station. Then a warm tortilla or taco is placed on the make-up counter and begins to move toward the cashier. Customers travel along with the item, indicating the types of ingredients they want to have added in. At the cashier station guests pick up their finished burrito or taco, select their drinks, and pay. One of the greatest challenges was trying to keep the queue line away from seated diners--no small task during peak serving periods.

The back-of-the-house design is straightforward and functional. Unlike most QSR operations there is no freezer (none of the Chipotle restaurants has a freezer because all food is fresh). As in all Chipotle units, there is an open display kitchen with three parallel components. The first level is the holding and assembly line. Immediately behind that line is the chefs' table, which they use to prep foods before cooking and to pass over foods to the serving staff. Behind this table is the production line where chefs are continually cooking small batches of fillings as the serving line staff orders them up. "Our goal is to keep the preparation and cooking in full view of the customers," notes Brand.

Alameda & Logan store in Denver

This particular location was not inherently interesting. It had a long narrow dining room measuring roughly 70 by 17 feet and an extremely low ceiling of just nine feet. The designers used a community table, dividers, and bench seating to help break up the space. They covered the ceiling with inexpensive gypsum board, allowed ductwork to poke through, and added slightly arched canopies with built-in lighting to add some architectural interest and further fragment the tunnel-like room. Along the left side of the space they replaced small windows with large glass doors to create a more expansive feeling.

The floor slabs are acid-stained concrete with a sealer. Acid stain produces a floor color called "padre brown," which is a brownish-red burnt umber. The intensity of the color on any part of the floor depends on the lime content of the concrete and what was previously on top of the concrete flooring: The color is intentionally uneven. The tables and chairs are fashioned from metal tubing, stainless steel, and plywood. Illumination is provided by off-the-shelf lights fitted with par-20 lamps. As in all of the restaurants, corrugated barn roofing is used as wainscoting and trash receptacles, rather than being identified by signage, are identified by vertical architectural elements.

In quick-service restaurants like Chipotle, guests are not encouraged to linger. High sound levels, caused by hard surfaces and music, play an important role in helping to turn tables in less than 30 minutes. That quick turnover rate is also helped by the seating itself. There are no pads on the seats. Flat plywood chairs and booths with a back pitch of just one-inch keep customers from lounging, but provide enough comfort for a short meal.

Unlike other operations that serve burritos and tacos, there are no references to south of the border. "While the food has a Mexican spin," Brand comments, "we are not trying to do anything that looks Mexican or Southwestern. I think this helps us to roll out our design across different parts the country, because we can easily adapt the style to different locations."