“ People think, Freemans is cool—let’s get the Freemans guy to design something,” Somer says. “Most of the time they just want me to kind of remake Freemans, which I refuse to do.”…“It’s kind of like the fifties, when Mies van der Rohe built a glass building. At the time it was totally unexpected, and really cool because the mirrored surface reflected all the old brick-masonry buildings around it. But then it was kind of weird, you know, when all buildings are suddenly mirror and glass. It’s that moment when the different thing becomes the same thing—to me that’s when you know it’s time to go somewhere else.
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New York Magazine: How Freemans and Rusty Knot Proprietor Developed His Downtown Anti-Style
I know it makes me an awful hipster to say this, but Taavo Somer, the New York fashion/restaurant impresario behind Freeman’s and the Rusted Knot, just has an undeniable touch when it comes to “making a scene”—in much the same way that Steve Jobs, say, has a preternatural instinct for product design. I admire his restless creativity, his refusal to repeat himself, and the way he gets so heavily immersed in his projects that he thinks of himself as a “method designer” and imagines elaborate back stories behind the restaurants he’s designing.