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“They kept showing up in sketches,” Michael Stillman says of the light fixture inspired by a black-and-white image from a meatpacking facility. “And me and my dad would go, ‘We don’t know what it is, but we like it. Whatever it is, it’s going to be cool.’”

The light fixture is as functional as it is eye-catching, composed of filament bulbs dangling from steel hooks that have been sandblasted, refinished, and mounted on rollers so that they slide horizontally to illuminate different parts of the table. “We grabbed this massive hook that would be used to stab into things,” Farmerie says. “We removed it from its existing condition and represented it in a new light as this highly finished, nickel-plated thing.”

The butcher-shop motif might have been far more blatant had AvroKO pushed through a plan to cover the walls with life-size portraits of working butchers, including Mo. Instead they were interpreted into waitstaff uniforms. Still, Albanese Meats did inform much more of the space than first impressions suggest. The graphics feature a strong, simple, readable font and—on menus, matchbooks, and bottles—a version of the small-print FDA stamp that adorns every cellophane-wrapped package of meat. Meanwhile, the dark- wood steel-bolted slats that traditionally line meat lockers were re-created on the dining-room walls. “We’re poking around in the back of the meat locker and we find this great wood, this great screw pattern,” Harris says. “Why not take that and make it into an element?”

Even Mo’s neighborhood gatherings, featuring cheese and cured meats, have their equivalent at Quality Meats. The butcher’s homemade wine finds its equal in the restaurant’s house red, bearing an AvroKO label. And the original front bar was chopped in half to create a separate nook, where charcuterie is served. “Before you even make it to the bar to get a drink the first thing you should do is hit the charcuterie bar,” Harris says. “It encourages a more social aspect in that area.”

The overall sensibility of the restaurant reflects a slower-paced New York, as evidenced in a rolling cart devoted to tableside steak sauce made to order with fresh-snipped herbs. There’s also a cheeky glass-enclosed nook down near the bathrooms with two oversize armchairs set around an old-fashioned phone offering free local calls. The AvroKO team likes to play with what might otherwise be throwaway spaces—in this case a former storage room. “It becomes this added spice,” Farmerie says. “This little room, it just galvanizes everybody’s imagination. It doesn’t have to participate as part of the function of the restaurant. You can completely do anything you want with it.”

The phone nook is one of many design curiosities in the edgy new restaurant with an unlikely Midtown locale. And as experiments in design dissonance typically go, Quality Meats is just the beginning. “Imagine walking through this fancy outdoor mall in Boca Raton, and you walk into a space that looks like this,” Michael Stillman says. “Until this restaurant was completed, everyone in the company had been looking at me like I was insane. But suddenly they’re starting to get it—‘I can see that working in the Grill.’ This has opened their eyes to how this aesthetic can work for a wider audience.”

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