Brulee: The Dessert Experience, Atlantic City, USA

Lighting Design: Paul Gregory and Mike Cummings of Focus Lighting

Located at The Quarter at Tropicana Casino & Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Brulee: The Dessert Experience is more than a brand new dining concept. Brulee is a dessert experience that raises the art of dessert making to the level of theatre.

Brulee exemplifies Atlantic City’s increased focus on a unique food and beverage experience – a lucrative aspect of casino environments that Vegas exposed some time ago. Featuring fabulous tableside flambé’s and other decadent creations, this dessert-only restaurant serves up an extraordinary menu complete with chef demonstrations on stage. Upscale yet indulgently inclusive (hey, who doesn’t like dessert), Brulee creations are served in a classic three-course French style. To complement your dessert is a selection of rare cognacs, champagnes, handcrafted tableside cocktails and more. Obviously, this is no Dairy Queen.

Focus Lighting
The Brulee interior is in some way reflective of the desserts themselves - eclectic and colorful; brown and white cow skin seats, glowing orange bar, violet neon, silver orb centerpiece, and colorful fiber optic. Lighting design was the creation of Paul Gregory and Mike Cummings of Focus Lighting of New York with project management by Focus’s Terrance Connolly. “For a customer’s first look we wanted to create a solid memory,” comments Paul Gregory of Focus Lighting. “We wanted to make the interior sing with lighting, so we absorbed ideas and moved ahead smoothly.”

FiberSource CMY 150
An important part of that musical color mix comes from Focus-supplied Martin FiberSource CMY 150’s powering fiber optic light points located in a central 360 degree mirror soffit. Capable of emitting a nearly endless variety of colors, the FiberSource are programmed as a dessert-matching white and yellow light effect during the day with color changes and waves of color predominate at night.

Color from the fiber points interacts with a custom designed crystal curtain that hangs from the ceiling. Paul and Mike did several mockups, experimenting on how to best get multiple sources of light to illuminate the crystals in order to make it twinkle.

The centerpiece of the room is an ornamental silver orb with chandelier that hangs from the ceiling. Around the orb is a band of neon with surrounding recessed MR16 downlights that also illuminate the crystal curtain in a warm amber color. Light plays reflectively off of the orb with the glow from the neon, the downlights, and the fiber points all meeting in the sparkle of the crystal curtain. The surrounding mirror soffit only adds to the effect and creates a feeling of infinity as the crystal and light are reflected.

Night time transformation
After 11:00 pm Brulee turns into a nightclub/bar complete with a small DJ area. Areas of toned down color during the day emerge at night and the whole space becomes more dramatic. Lighting dims and daytime downlighiting shifts to night time sidelight. The fiber optic becomes even more active with use of the FiberSource’s twinkle effect.

“The concept was to create a dramatic shift from day to night time operation and to achieve that through lighting,” comments Mike Cummings of Focus Lighting. “The idea was to go from a serene, elegant, white, classy environment to a hot, exciting club environment. We use the Martin FiberSource to achieve more invisibility by day with white or yellow lighting, while at night they are used more dramatically to light the crystal.”

More color comes from red mill work behind the bar with a distinctive red band illuminated with 24v light strips. A wall mounted liquor locker with copper mesh door is front lit during the day and then internally lit at night, silhouetting the bottles inside.

Interior design for Brulee is by Daroff Design Inc. of Philadelphia with the nightclub design completed in partnership with Steve Lewis.

“The collaboration was immense but it was a great experience,” concludes Paul. “The whole collaboration made the process and outcome enjoyable.”