Cha Chah
Nashville, Tennessee
Cha Chah is a small upscale Spanish-style tapas restaurant with a deliberate and casual Asian twist. Situated intimately along Belmont Boulevard in Nashville, Arnold Myint and Ross Powells developed their concept among a small grouping of turn-of-the-century homes grown into local favorite eating, drinking, and social gathering establishments. A core design element of this concept was to maintain a close connection with the neighborhood and sidewalk culture inherent to the community. To achieve this, an all season conditioned patio with operable glass garage doors serves as the primary dining area at the front of the restaurant. To compliment this, an open air sidewalk patio beneath the cantilevered and folding roof plane engages the street scape and establishes an inviting and open pedestrian scale of the building at the sidewalk. The main interior dining room, located in the original 1900's bungalow house, is modest in size seating 16 guests, but presents itself in a much more formal and intimate fashion with low level chandelier lighting, original stone fireplace, and dark stained wood floors and furniture. A long narrow bar-height table adjacent to the entry allows for casually gatherings and conversation away from the bar and seating areas, while a covered back porch with fabric curtains provides a serene environment for quiet intimate outdoor dining and small private functions. An over-sized kitchen allows Myint, who studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, ample room to design and explore new menu items and concepts without interrupting the food production for dining during business hours, and also serves as a prep and holding area for private catered events.
