Summary
Savor is an upscale restaurant run by the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, a division of Niagara County Community College. Every summer they host Savor on the Street, an outdoor dining option where students in the culinary arts, pastry arts, and hospitality programs gain real-world restaurant experience.
As Corian® Solid Surface is inherently renewable, reusable, recyclable, the Corian® R&D team is constantly exploring new applications for Corian®. Since Corian® is the perfect material for food service applications, the team developed modular furniture that was easy to assemble and disassemble, for outdoor dining environments.
Located in a high-traffic tourist area of Niagara Falls, the Corian® R&D team identified Savor as the perfect location to test their modular fabrications.
“Savor’s mission is to provide a hands-on learning experience for students, and we were looking to determine how Corian® furniture would perform in a real-world setting,” said Keith Pollak of the Corian® Design site team. “Not only was this an ideal location for our testing, but it was also very important to support the Savor on the Street program.”
While typical Corian® joints are held together with a thermosetting, two-part adhesive that makes a permanent bond, the Corian® R&D team applied joinery techniques developed for wood that could enable similar structures using Corian® Solid Surface. This technique made it possible to both reuse excess materials from larger projects and provide new opportunities for how Corian® pieces can be recycled, helping to support a circular economy.
What impressed the Savor leadership team was how easy the Corian® pieces were to customize. The restaurant’s signature ‘S’ was incorporated into the table legs, and logos and point-of- sale information were easily printed onto Corian® panels. Even the menu boards can be reused through conventional sanding, and dye-subbing the new menu onto the resurfaced Corian®.
“We were able to offer a much more dynamic, attractive, and unique dining experience for our guests using custom Corian® Design-made furniture,” said Josh Blumberg, Assistant Vice- President, Academic Affairs, Campus Manager Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, NCCC. “Features such as the clever purse hooks and sublimated branding made us pop amongst all the other competition on Old Falls Street in beautiful downtown Niagara Falls. We are so appreciative of the talented engineers and fabricators at DuPont who created these one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture.”
In addition to its performance benefits the Corian® furniture developed for Savor on the Street provided stunning aesthetics, intuitive assembly, and were easy to store because the disassembled pieces can lie flat. And because Corian® can withstand weather variations and provide enough weight to deter theft, and can be easily customized, the Corian® R&D team is excited for the future of modular fabrication, and enhancing the reuse and recyclability options for Corian®.
Savor Restaurant
28 Old Falls Street
Niagara Falls, NY 14303
nfculinary.org/savor
Savor, Niagara Falls Culinary Institute’s (NFCI) upscale dining restaurant, provides a real-world hands-on learning experience for students enrolled in the Culinary Arts, Pastry Arts and Hospitality programs. Savor features an open kitchen where student chefs are on “display” to showcase their talents to the guests. Students work in rotation throughout Savor, including the wood-stone oven, serving fine dining cuisine. The goal is to expose students to classically prepared cuisine, presented in today’s modern style, with an emphasis on using high quality ingredients, all in a state-of-the-art kitchen.
Savor is open to the public and offers a prix fixe lunch and dinner menu.
Corian® Design, a division of DuPont Water & Protection, is a global organization which creates, manufactures and markets advanced materials, products and solutions for interior design and architecture, originating from a foundation of world-class technologies and expertise. Marketed under the Corian® brand and the Make your Space™ tagline, its materials, products and solutions meet the most demanding requirements in terms of beauty, functionality and durability. The Corian® Design global portfolio is continuously evolving, and it currently includes Corian® Solid Surface and Corian® Quartz. To learn more about Corian® Design, visit www.corian.com