Job title: Restaurant designer

Companies that hire them: Design-savvy restaurants, hotels, and entertainment companies.

How to find out about openings: There’s been an explosion in the number of firms specializing in hospitality design in recent years; some of the best known include Perkins & Will, Gensler, and Hok. Many of them advertise jobs on their websites or with the career centers at nearby colleges and universities. You can also send your résumés to firms directly; some of them keep piles around to dip into when there’s an opening.

How much you can earn: According to Interior Design magazine’s annual industry survey, salaries in “hospitality design” averaged $133,202 in 2007, with top earners bringing in as much as $600,000 a year.

Useful skills: No specific background is necessary: Designers can have degrees in the fields of fashion, film, or art. A degree from a noted graduate school of design is a plus, however, and an understanding of and passion for design basics like color, lighting, and spatial relationships are essential.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: There are more than 200 hospitality design firms in the U.S., and they design for everything from restaurants to Broadway theaters. The biggest of these firms employ hundreds of designers each, while the smallest employ fewer than 10.

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For his latest project, Adam D. Tihany is traveling to Beijing, taking with him materials from elsewhere in the world, in the hopes of creating a feeling of Beijing. He will be bringing eight 4-by-4-foot boxes filled with items such as ceiling fans and other furnishings, architectural renderings, 3-D models, and finishing materials such as stone, marble, glass, metal, and fabric.

Unlike the designers of some restaurants and hotels that want their interiors to reflect a corporate or global style, Tihany wants his interiors to be rooted in the places where they are located. “I want people to feel that they are in Beijing when they walk into this place,” he says. “That sense of authenticity is the absolute key to success.”

The celebrated interior designer of restaurants such as New York’s Per Se, Jean George, and Le Cirque, 59-year-old Tihany is in the thick of his current job: designing the restaurants and bars of the Shangri-La Hotel in Beijing, set to open in 2010.

He’s focused on creating spaces that are contemporary yet authentically Chinese at the same time. “Asian ethnicity has changed,” he says. “Symbols like gold, screens, lanterns, and lacquered wood are relics from the past.” In order to update these standbys, he’s proposing to install nine-foot glass lanterns in the kitchen of one of the restaurants, for example.

Tihany all but invented the profession of “restaurant designer” when he first hung out a shingle in 1980, making him the granddaddy of this burgeoning segment of the hospitality design industry. While studying architecture in Milan, the former Israeli soldier took an apprenticeship at an architecture firm, making ends meet by painting homes in his spare time. Within two years, his creativity and flair got him promoted to partner, and he eventually moved to New York in 1976 to become design director at Unigram before founding his own firm. In the 1980s and 1990s, he co-owned Remi, an Italian eatery in Manhattan, giving him a special cachet with his restaurant clients today.

Chefs often consider him “a colleague, rather than just a designer,” Tihany explains. “They don’t need to discuss what a service station is and where it has to be, and we can get down to the real essence of what the restaurant needs to be.”

For a restaurant like Per Se, Tihany charges a fixed fee of about $500,000 (watch Tihany’s private tour of Per Se for Portfolio.com). A restaurant opening like that takes a minimum of one year, and involves round-the-clock planning, designing, presenting, negotiating, and contracting.

Today, his company, Tihany Design, is a worldwide brand, with 22 employees in offices in New York and Rome. At any given time, the company is handling about 10 projects, and usually two to three are new restaurant openings.

The designer spends about 10 days a month traveling, supervising the 90 percent of his current projects located outside the U.S. and scoping out new clients everywhere from Seoul to Monte Carlo to Croatia. But when he is in New York, Tihany starts his day at 7 a.m. in his Manhattan office near the Fashion Institute of Technology.

It’s an apt location, given that Tihany often compares his work to the commissioning of a bespoke suit. “When you finally arrive to the point that you need to have a custom suit made, you come to me,” Tihany says.

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