LAX Restaurant’s New Decor to Match Its Spaceship Image

Lava lamps shaped like flying saucers dot the counters. Walls that look like the moon’s surface bracket the room. And red chairs that look like floating cushions hover in front of the bar.

The intergalactic decor seems only fitting for a world-famous building that resembles a giant spaceship squatting in the middle of Los Angeles International Airport.

After being closed for more than a year, the former Theme Room Restaurant at LAX is reopening Dec. 27 with a new name, a new menu and a new interior that ushers in the 21st century.

“Our question was, what can we do to this icon that is as visible as the Statue of Liberty,” said Jon L. Luther, president of CA One Services, the food service company with a 10-year contract to run the restaurant.

The answer was to devise something that could have been a part of the set design from the television series “The Jetsons.”

Inside the new restaurant known as Encounter, the theme is pure Space Age, from the multicolored carpet with spheroid designs to the serving staff’s Star Trek-like uniforms to the sculpted ceiling highlighted with blue and purple lights.

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“Over there is the domestic terminal and over there is the international terminal,” said Luther, pointing through the enormous windows that look onto the airport. “This is the intergalactic terminal where everybody can come and create some energy to eat.”

The Theme Room’s overhaul is part of the airport’s gastronomic revolution. Food service at the airport had been dominated for 34 years by one concessionaire, Host International Inc.

But nearly two years ago, the Los Angeles City Council approved contracts with seven new food and beverage providers to lend some diversity to what could only be described as, well, airport food. In marched such restaurants such as Wolfgang Puck’s pizzeria, Rhino Chasers microbrewery, the Daily Grill and Sushi Boy.

CA One Services, which operates restaurants in 33 airports nationwide, received the contract for the Theme Room, which opened in 1961. Connie Bass, who runs the Los Angeles catering company The Ultimate Symphony, is a joint venture partner.

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As part of its $3.5-million investment, CA One employed Walt Disney Imagineering to design the interior. Executives and designers tossed around several ideas, such as a sports theme restaurant and a chic continental eatery. But in the end, the Space Age theme appeared the most appropriate for the spaceship building designed by architect Paul R. Williams.

For a while, there was talk of having a robotic maitre d’, but that idea was discarded as too expensive. Instead, the hostess will look like Jane Jetson in a futuristic costume and the cocktail waitresses will have short uniforms with pointy shoulders and incandescent zippers.

Designer Ed Sotto of Walt Disney Imagineering set out to create an out-of-this-world feeling to the decor. He took pictures of the moon’s surface and superimposed their images onto cement to create the three-dimensional walls covered with small craters. The bar’s counter top resembles colorful moonstone.

Outside, the building’s parabolic arches will be bathed in constantly changing shades of magenta, electric blue and white lights that will give it the eerie effect of floating over the airport.

In the past, the Theme Room Restaurant was never known for its great cuisine. It was better remembered for its overpriced menu that resembled something from a chain-hotel restaurant in the middle of America.

But executive chef Patrick Glennon and consulting chef John Rivera Sedlar have come up with a melange of food from around the world and called it “California fusion.” Entrees include seared Chilean sea bass for $25, Moroccan casbah duck for $21, and Brazilian-style swordfish steak for $22. One of their delicacies will be the Encounter dessert with floating chocolate orbs and hazelnut butter cream for $12. “It is space age food for the jet set,” Sedlar said.

The large windows that wrap around the restaurant give a spectacular view of planes landing and taking off and of the whirl of terrestrial traffic moving counterclockwise.

But with the look to the future, there is one thing that hasn’t changed about this 35-year-old building. The restaurant still doesn’t rotate, as so many people believe it did.