Bistrotheque’s Flash at the Royal Academy for Wallpaper: It’s 11 a.m. in an unused corner of 6 Burlington Gardens at the back of the the Royal Academy of Art in London’s Mayfair, and restaurateur Pablo Flack is endeavoring to explain how this vast, austere room will soon be transformed into perhaps the most rigorously conceived museum restaurant in history: specifically, Flash, a new pop-up eatery from Flack and his partner David Waddington—famous as the creators of Bistrotheque and last year’s pioneering and somewhat over-ambitous pop-restaurant The Reindeer and now invited by the Royal Academy to temporarily inhabit this space.

Their 80-day stay here will coincide with GSK Contemporary, the Royal Academy’s inaugural season of work by new and emerging artists including René Pollesch, Olaf Nicolai, and Catherine Sullivan; the show debuts October 31, Flash the following day.

Even staring into it, it’s hard to see how Flack’s vision will materialize in this cavernous space, which is lit by a row of windows and currently overrun by Waddington and Flack’s collaborators, who are awaiting an afternoon photo shoot.

Though Flack has been laid relatively low by food poisoning by, he believes, a suspect hamburger, he’s thoroughly animated while recalling the epiphany behind Flash: “It was the last night of the Reindeer, and I remember walking up the main aisle—I just saw a room in a room, with a big chandelier, and the room-in-a-room was almost like a film set, so you’d walk onto the set, and that was it,” Flack says. “I sort of went around to everybody like, ‘It’s going to be called Flash.’ They just thought I was totally mad.”

Indeed, there’s an unmistakably Alice in Wonderland feel to this morning’s proceedings, at least if the children’s story were transported to one of the most exclusive addresses in Mayfair—and infiltrated by some of the East End’s best-known talents. There’s Giles Deacon, in a sweatshirt and jeans, eating a sandwich he brought in himself; he’s designing the restaurant’s chandelier, which will be made of peridot-green Swarovski crystals and 158 aluminum spikes. It emerges that Deacon has a history in DIY chandelier fabrication.

“I’ve made them at home with bits of wire,” he says. “I quite like doing them as a nice gift for friends.” Chef Tom Collins has been sent off to change into his working clothes; illustrator Will Broome, whose drawings now adorn the several servings of the signature Wedgwood White collection that are laid out for use in the photo shoot, sits quietly in the hallway, headphones on his ears. The illustrator Rory Crichton explains how his own contribution to the space will involve depictions of cutlery-wielding octopi and cabbage rabbits. What’s a cabbage rabbit? “A rabbit with a cabbage for a dress,” he says plainly. “Something daft—some daft surreal images, like I normally do with Giles.” When I tell him I can’t wait to see it, Crichton grimaces, mindful of an impending deadline. “Neither can I.”

The partnership with the Royal Academy is a huge move up and out of east London for Flack and Waddington, whose greatest successes have come on home turf—with Bistrotheque in Bethnal Green and with the Reindeer, which lived its brief life within the confines of the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.

Today’s assortment of artists, illustrators, and designers come chiefly, but not entirely, from east London. (Fulham resident Broome is an exception: “People always think I live in a wigwam in Hoxton, but I don’t,” he says. “I do go to east London, but just to sort of laugh at people and point at them.”

Flash’s infiltration of the Royal Academy—perhaps the most venerable arts organization in the world—is the latest creative encroachment on this historically reserved neighborhood: Mayfair galleries have long shown the work of east Londoners, but the arrival four years ago of Commes des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market, the six-storey celebration of the new and the next, heralded a fresh start for the enclave—or at least a reason for creative cognoscenti to visit Dover Street or nearby Mount Street, where Marc Jacobs would set up shop at number 23-25 the following year. After decamping to Hoxton in 2000, White Cube returned to the area six years later, with Jay Jopling opening a new space in Mason’s Yard.

This art-minded advance on the city’s most rarefied spaces is at the heart of Flash as well. “We all—whatever our businesses and livelihoods and talents and skills—of course everyone wants to do it in Mayfair,” Flack says. “I don’t know anyone from the East End who wants to be stuck there. My whole thing about the contemporary art season, and Will drawing on the Wedgwood, is this idea of heritage subverted by youth. It’s not that we want to do away with the heritage—you want to keep the bits that are quite cool and just add some other bits.”

The crucial “bit” added here is a thorough reimagining of the restaurant space. After the photo shoot is completed, architect David Kohn walks the perimeter of Flack’s room-within-a-room, which is demarcated by six slender white columns, Victorian additions to what was once a two-storey library. Flack’s room will be bordered by five-metre-high stacks of art crates, opened to reveal, among other things, work by Crichton, Simon Popper, and Alexis Teplin. Each artist was asked to design a separate layer, from Crichton’s bottom-dwelling octopi to Teplin’s birds, at top. (The natural elements reference the fact that 6 Burlington Gardens, was, indeed, once a garden—when Burlington House was first constructed as a stately home in the 17^th century.

Flack’s idea is an intriguing exploration of the theatre of restaurants and, as Kohn suggests, an irreverent play on the room’s classical architecture—but perhaps not an art installation, as it’s described in materials promoting the restaurant. “I call it a set, but other people have called it an installation, and there are some similarities. We’re creating quite a controlled little world, and in that way it’s very similar to an artist creating an installation in a gallery—they do their best to control that world in the space that they’ve got,” says Flack.

Kohn uses theatrical metaphors to explain the use of art crates to define the central eating space. “I was keen that [the walls] not be made of set material—from the stage side it looks like something, but from the back-of-house it looks like nothing,” Kohn says, gesturing to the crates that were brought into the room this morning for the photo shoot.

When the restaurant is fully constructed, the art crates will outline an interior dining space; outside them will be a makeshift back-of-house, including a prep kitchen. Guests will essentially walk through busy preparation areas on their way to tables. “We don’t want to stifle people’s experiences by concept, but the concept is that we’ve turned a restaurant inside-out, so you kind of see the guts when you walk in,” Flack says. “People will walk into the back-of-house, where people are making drinks, and there’s a prep kitchen—you’ll think, ‘I’ve obviously walked through the wrong door,’” Flack says. “But then you’ll walk onto the set, where the atmosphere is totally controlled. People won’t notice it, but they’ll feel a sense of calm.”

“Calm” was not the operative byword at the Reindeer, the 23-day winter wonderland of snow-covered fir trees and illuminated log cabins, with Deacon-designed plates and Christmas crackers created by Katie Grand. Its 310 seats were some of the most desirable in town, even if, Flack now concedes, the overwhelming hype finally did the restaurants few favors. “We ended up doing a lot of Christmas parties, and to be honest, they’re not very pleasant,” he says. “There’s so many people, and they’re usually drunk and most people usually don’t even want to be there. To be honest, hosting lots of them is like….” Flack concludes his thought with an utterance that is midway between a groan and a shudder. “The whole thing was my Christmas fantasy—I used to spend Christmas with my auntie in Bournemouth, and I kind of based the Reindeer on that style of Christmas—this kind of wintery Narnia, rather than tinsel baubles. But at the Reindeer, we’d literally be there with 75 real trees covered in snow, and there’s log cabins and everything’s aglow, and you’d get people going, ‘It’s just not very Christmasy,” Flack says. “You’d just want to kill them.”

Lessons learned, Flack and Waddington have refined the pop-up formula for Flash, which will offer only around 100 places, down from the Reindeer’s 310; the great majority of tables will seat four or fewer, and many will be held back for last-minute guests. “We realized that if we did it again, we wanted to do it much more for our natural crowd, which is the art and fashion world,” Flack says. “With the Reindeer, everybody had booked months in advance—but our regulars aren’t the sort of people who’ll do that. The people you really want to be there, because they make the restaurant fun—they make decisions at six o’clock. We want more of that spontaneity, so when people who are in the exhibitions come by and ask if we have a table, we can say yes.”

There seems to be an unusual synergy between Flash and the GSK exhibitions that will appear above and around the restaurant—in galleries open for viewing, their curator David Thorp says, for the first time since the USA Today exhibition in 2006. GSK and Flash together represent a rather forceful step into new ground for the Royal Academy. “The launch party [for Flash] was unbelievable,” says Kohn. “There’s the director of the Royal Academy, there’s the head academician, the great and the good—and then the lights went out and in burst four trannies singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ carrying torches. The only thing illuminated is this big bearded face with painted lips and a bra falling off, and I can’t quite believe this is happening, and I certainly can’t believe this is happening in the Royal Academy—and that they’re brave enough to take what is clearly a risk.”

If he’s at all anxious about that risk, Thorp—well regarded for his pioneering work with PS1 in New York and Platform China in Beijing—is hiding it well. “I quite like the idea of the Royal Academy being squatted by all these artists—I think it’s actually a very convenient way to think of the structure of this building,” says Thorp, who gestures into a two-storey stairwell, beautifully sunlit, where Rémy Markowitsch’s “Onion Options” will hang in just over two months’ time. “We’ve got all these different people inhabiting all these different spaces; that’s what Bistrotheque is doing, taking control of the situation. It’s sweet, this idea of the East End taking over the West End. I like it.”

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