Still, several RH diners, all of them customers of the store, said they came not for the food, but for the aesthetics.
“It is not, like, Wolfgang Puck,” said Christy Clarey, 55, of Newport Beach, Calif., who was visiting the RH Rooftop Restaurant at RH New York, located around the corner from the Dining Room at RH Guesthouse. “That is his brand. He is the chef. This just has to be good-basic.”
Anuja Beauchamp, 45, a customer at RH Rooftop Restaurant at RH Dallas, returned to the restaurant “to see if they are going to trade out the chandeliers” in the dining room. She said she didn’t have high expectations of the food, but it was better than she anticipated.
Faith Wilde, 25, another guest in Dallas, said that these days, she is more interested in a restaurant’s appearance. “If it doesn’t look like this, we probably won’t even go,” she said.
RH opened its first restaurant in 2015, in the courtyard of a historic building in the wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. Most locations share roughly the same furnishings (chandeliers, olive trees, a fountain) and menu (burgers, chicken, Caesar salads). And more restaurants are on the way, with plans to open in Paris, London, Palo Alto, Calif., and Aspen, Colo.