BOMAKI

Bar and restaurant MILAN - Italy

Where better for Bomaki to open its seventh venue than the historic district of Brera in Milan? This hotbed of fashion and buzzing city energy is the perfect home for the unique restaurant, where diners can enjoy special flavour combinations created by Partner and Executive/Corporate Chef Jeric Bautista. Even its name is inspired by fusion: ‘bom’ is Brazilian for ‘good’, while ‘maki’ is the tasty Japanese roll.

In this new restaurant, the Bomaki team wanted to create a homely feel with a mix of colours and cultures to echo the atmosphere in typical bars and eateries in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (after all, Brazil is one of the countries in which Japanese food has been most warmly adopted). The sensory experience hits you as soon as you walk in, with Colombian-inspired furnishings dotted around, walls draped in vibrant rainforest patterns and azulejo tiles, and soft lighting coming from numerous brightly coloured ceiling lamps.

To complete the experience, good music and a great sound system were essential to the vision of the Bomaki team. They needed crystal-clear audio from speakers that would complement the venue’s carefully designed aesthetics. “We want to offer customers clean, high-quality sound to accompany their dinners and lunches, and this is what led to our choice of Pioneer PRO AUDIO CM speakers. Their design also makes them perfect for the ambiance, because the visual impact is the first form of experience at Bomaki,” explains Marco Zaki, Bomaki’s Marketing Manager. “Having already installed a very important Pioneer PRO AUDIO system in the Jazz Café, which we also own, we knew all about the reliability and quality of sound, and so it was a natural choice to install Pioneer PRO AUDIO products here too.”

Although the restaurant was custom built, and therefore ready for the installation of the sound system, the project didn’t come without challenges. With multiple zones seating a total of 100 guests – including a main dining area and a mezzanine floor – installation company Skeldon Cooperative Society needed to fill the open space with sound and overcome several potential hurdles. “The main challenge we had to address was that of the reflective surfaces, like the large glass windows, in addition to the fact that the restaurant is an open space with a ground and mezzanine floor,” remembers Sound Technician Sergio Caio. Using a variety of CM Series surface mount speakers to blend in with the decor, plus subwoofers to provide warm bass – all driven by Powersoft amps – the Skeldon team was able to achieve the desired result. “We positioned the speakers at strategic points to have the best possible coverage of the area with a well-balanced frequency response. The large quantity of speakers allowed us to improve sound diffusion, keep a lower volume level for each unit, and avoid any incoming noise from outside,” Caio explains.

Feedback from Bomaki staff has also been positive. “We realised right away that the sound quality was superior,” says Zaki. “This is what we wanted and needed: excellent, balanced and high-quality sound to complete our customers’ experience with pleasant, non-invasive background music.”

To give the restaurant team complete control over their system, a Powersoft WM Touch unit enables them to easily tweak the sound in different zones. It’s the icing on the cake for the installation, which has more than lived up to expectations, says Bomaki’s Zaki: “Our experience with Pioneer PRO AUDIO has always been very positive and this allows us to say that we will, without doubt, turn to them again for our next venues!”