Donna Restaurant, New York

Officially opened on May 17th, 2023, Donna is a worker-owned restaurant and cocktail bar located in the heart of the West Village, offering a pan-Latin menu with Mediterranean influences as well as an award-winning cocktail program drawing from Filipino cuisine and tropical flavors. The new iteration breathes new life into Donna, which closed its popular Williamsburg outpost in December 2020 after nearly a decade in business.

Donna’s West Village location (7 Cornelia Street), provides a stylish, vibrant, and intimate drinking and dining experience that champions sustainability and alternative materials. The opening also marks an exciting moment of growth for the business, as the property integrates an equitable worker-ownership structure.

The design of Donna’s West Village location sets the tone for the future of hospitality while still acknowledging the past. Artists such as Sandu Darie, Pedro Alvarez, and Lygia Clark served as visual inspiration, emblematic of the constructivist art movements of Latin America in the 20th Century (specifically Cuban Concretism and Brazilian Neo-Concretism). Donna’s new worker-owned cooperative model also serves as a jumping-off point for its architectural style.

Designer Michael Groth collaborated with Moroccan artisan cooperative The Anou (https://www.theanou.com/about) to develop custom wall hangings for the main dining area, which pair with natural wool rugs for harmonious acoustics. On the walls, limewash plaster in graphic geometric shapes brings rich texture and warmth to the space, while serving to passively regulate humidity and air quality for guests and workers.

Custom lighting throughout offers another marriage of old and new: pendants in the dining room utilize reclaimed embroidery hoops as the structure for woven paper shades. They were designed using a new computational algorithm, which adapted the woven forms to vintage hoops. Additionally, shades grown from mycelium adorn the pendants above the bar – an environmentally holistic approach to material creation that poetically reflects Donna’s equitable business model.

Dining tables and banquettes utilize reclaimed Douglas fir flooring and plywood stained with natural finishes; elsewhere, elements have been repurposed from the previous tenant of the space, including the wood floor and back-bar shelving. The bar tops are being fabricated by Brooklyn Stone and Tile, another worker-owned cooperative where the Donna team held their first in-person co-op meetings. The use of any net-new materials was limited to those that are natural and biodegradable, keeping in mind the holistic effects of resource extraction, human health and equity, and circular material cycles.