Sydney: Who are you? And what do you do?
Dominic: I'm Dominic Müller. I have a lot of things going on. I have an advertising agency called Acre Creative, so I work in production. And then I also have an art gallery that I'm opening soon, sometime next year. And then the other big thing is I'm opening a bar & restaurant in Echo Park. I do a lot of different things. My background is art and I just ended up in production for most of my life. I’m ow fading out of that and into something different, which is more art and the bar-restaurant world.
Sydney: What is Dada?
Dominic: Dada is whatever you want it to be honestly, like, the Dada artists movement from the 1920s. For me, that’s when art really kinda started happening, with the Readymades. A lot of other artists like Warhol wouldn't exist without Dadaism. This idea of turning art on its head, basically, and rethinking what art is. Art is everything, but it's also there's a whole manifesto behind it.
Sydney: It is also fun to say.
Dominic: It is.
Sydney: Okay, so you kind of already answered what led you to opening this restaurant. How did you choose who to work with, and where do you get your design inspo?
Dominic: My business partner Christine had the space. And she was like, Hey, do you want to open a bar-restaurant? It took me a couple of days to think about it, because honestly, it's such a crazy thing to do. It wasn't straight out the gate “okay, I want to do that”. And then once I decided to do it, it was like boarding the plane to a project in Alaska or somewhere. And then I was reading this book about the Dadaists, and that's when the thought popped into my head. And I remember texting Christine “DADA”. So then it became this art thing for me. And that's the segue into clearing out the space and creating the canvas, which is what I always do when it comes to space. I've done a few spaces in my life, houses, and I've helped other people do spaces, I’ve helped create the canvas. A lot of that with the restaurant was clearing the vocabulary that was in there before I came in, which was just too heavy. It didn't feel like California, didn’t feel like LA. So we had to clear the canvas.
And that's how I happened upon Jonathan, like it was meant to be.
