Fire and salt fuel the new Beef Club eatery at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg campus

An open brick fireplace at Beef Club, Autostadt, Wolfsburg.

Found within the future-facing Volkswagen campus – which serves as a brand hub and an experience centre – in Wolfsburg, Germany, restaurant Beef Club has reopened its doors following an extensive refresh by Ester Bruzkus Architekten. The project follows a basic rule of sustainability, which, according to Peter Greenberg, partner at the German architecture studio, is ‘to save as much as possible but to make it as contemporary as possible’. As such, the team strived to reuse elements from the restaurant’s previous iteration but repurposed them to upgrade its atmosphere.

Nature and innovation collide at Beef Club

The front of the restaurant is a bright and open dining room that is intended to have a very social atmosphere (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

The fresh design – which references the fire and salt that are key elements of Beef Club cooking – combines a spacious communal area with a sophisticated private zone. At the heart of the public dining experience is a visible open kitchen and brick fireplace that display the theatrical grilling of meats and vegetables. Both follow a composition of three kinds of fired brick, glazed and unglazed, in different formats. Adjacent to this is a large pink salt monolith by Königssalz, used as a counter to display different kinds of salt that are used in the dishes. Individual tables lie ahead, crafted from salt-treated wood and displaying a unique colour and texture. Meanwhile, wooden benches running the room’s length and inspired by Alvar Aalto’s Wolfsburg churches, enhance the social feel of the restaurant.

At the centre of the space is the theatrical preparation of food on a grill (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

The salt block is used for the display of salts used in the cooking process (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

A detail of the grill (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

Enveloping Beef Club is a discreet, earthy colour palette complemented by industrial-style lighting and technical fixtures, such as silver cylindrical overhead lamps repurposed from the previous space. Shades of green, brown, orange, and black contribute to the cosy atmosphere of the room, which looks out to a leafy canal. A shift into darker floor tiles welcomes guests into the private dining room, where the light and colours are slightly more lavish. Here, the old booth seating and bar set-up are reused with new finishes to maintain a cohesive look. ‘All in all, the project’s concept is to harness the archaic within the technological, inviting the community of Wolfsburg into the campus,’ adds Greenberg.

Bar furniture from the restaurant’s previous iteration was reused and upgraded with new finishes: stainless steel, mirror and colours that create a coherent atmosphere (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

A detail of the bar area (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

In the back area, the light and colours are richer and deeper, adding to the sense of intimacy. The booth seating was salvaged from the former version of the restaurant and gives the sense of a room within a room (Image credit: Photography by Pion Studio. Courtesy of Ester Bruzkus Architekten)

Beef Club is located at Stadtbrücke, Wolfsburg, autostadt.de