This week, the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS launched its eleventh national tour of “Dining by Design.” DIFFA invites companies to sponsor an eleven-by-eleven-foot space created by the designer of their choosing. Designers like David Stark for Benjamin Moore and the Rockwell Group used everything from paint chips to yarn to make high-end tables in the most intimate of dining rooms. Watch the slideshow to see some of our favorites.

Slideshow: "Dining by Design"

After their usual 48 hours of toil, design firm AvroKo has turned Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring. Designer William Harris tells us the firm found inspiration in both New Zealand’s open landscapes and in English gardens (hence concrete casts of 18th century garden statues). Harris and friends used strong greens for the upholstery and chair backs, green- and gold-washed paper for the wall panels, and plenty of what he calls “brass moments that nature could live in.” The central installment consists of flowers captured inside of brass rods, and the wall panels feature brass molding. But see for yourself.

When Suzie Wong opened recently, it brought to New York four more Buddha statues. At this point there may be more Buddhas in local restaurants than in all the temples in Kyoto. Suzie Wong’s statues are less than a foot tall, which made us wonder: Have these icons been shrinking since Tao plopped down its twenty-foot-tall Buddhankadonk eight years ago? We compiled some stats, took some pretty pictures, and made a nice slideshow out of it. And now, your moment of Zen.

Buddha: Enlightening the Dining Room [Slideshow]

Bar Carrera exudes impeccable elegance in everything from its prominently displayed ham legs to its napkin dispensers — a touchstone of tapas-bar authenticity. But last night we were dismayed to see these notes from the NYPD dotting the bar and counters. We wouldn't expect to see such tacky reminders on the outdoor tables of tapas bars in Spain, where street urchins regularly approach tables. Anyone bold enough to, um, pocket these silly things?

Last week ’wichcraft jumped on the know-where-your-food-comes-from bandwagon by replacing the plain ol’ numbers on its “table cards” (doled out to customers so servers can locate them) with semi-campy descriptions of how its food is sourced. We’re glad we can now bite into a BLT (served only during “BLT season”) knowing that the applewood-smoked bacon was custom-made by D’Artagnan and the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative, and the heirloom tomatoes come from Eckerton Hill Farm in Pennsylvania. As you can see by reading the cards, there are other fun facts: The pastrami comes from the West Coast (via David’s Old World), the jelly is made from “greenmarket fruit that [our chef] just can’t resist,” and the tuna comes from our own Primizie Foods (hence mercury levels “so low they’re often untraceable”). One quibble: What’s up with referring to “soda” as “pop”? Did Jersey boy Colicchio pick this up from Danny Meyer when he was at Gramercy Tavern?

’wichcraft table cards [PDF]

When Alain Ducasse opened at the Essex House in 2000, not only was it an important culinary moment for the city, it was a great day for handbags. In his quest to civilize an unruly New York dining public, the detail-obsessed restaurateur had equipped each table with a red-velvet-upholstered footstool upon which women could give their precious clutches a proper stage, rather than just dump them on the floor like an old Duane Reade shopping bag.

Reserve the private alcove at Omido for your next get-together, and on its ceiling you’ll find no less than 10,000 “omikuji,” rice-paper strips of approximately three inches by eight inches. Visitors to Shinto temples draw them at random in order to ascertain their fortunes, but Adam Farmerie, of design firm AvroKo, says that when he put them up, he wasn’t taking any chances with bad luck. When temples refused to sell to him directly because he was a Westerner who lived outside of Japan, he asked one of his Japanese colleagues to have her mother buy them in bulk in Tokyo and send him only the “good to average luck” fortunes. He didn’t want contractors hanging them, so, for three days, five AvroKo employees tied them up according to Japanese tradition. “It turned out to be more of a pain in the butt to install than we initially thought,” he says. “It was trying at times.” With the help of some effervescent backlighting, however, it turned out quite nicely — clearly a stroke of good fortune.

As Bar Boulud recovers from its private blowout last night and readies for its January 8 opening, they’ll be taking extra care to wipe down the fifteen-seat “tasting table in the round” — soon to be the site of many a “wine orgy,” if you believe the restaurant rep. Made of white oak (to give it that new-wine-barrel smell), the table is fourteen feet in diameter, built by Aveum of Mexico City, and designed by Thomas Schlesser. The table is modeled after eighteenth- and nineteenth-century negotiation negociant tables where businessmen served drinks to potential clients.

When Carlos Suarez dreamed up Bobo, he wanted to avoid the “large, impersonal restaurants” he says were cropping up in the meatpacking district. So he rented a U-Haul and drove it upstate every weekend for months. “We’d come back with truckloads of goodies,” he says, and among them were six yellow French country chairs that he purchased at a Saugerties antique store for $50 to $75 each.

Thirteen years ago Donna Lennard and Alberto Avalle took over what was then the studio and workshop of artist Warren Muller and opened an antiques store with Muller’s quirky chandeliers front and center. It would become the little slice of loveliness known as Il Buco, where Muller’s creations are still for sale at prices starting around $3,000. You’re likely to get the owners to part with the one incorporating oil cans — Lennard says customers always bang their heads on it — but if your heart is set on the not-for-sale one above the bar (an antique rake with porcelain sockets on each rung, not pictured) Lennard will send you to the artist’s Philadelphia studio. “He’s a magical guy,” Lennard says of Muller. “He loves to play with light in fantastical ways.” So fantastical, in fact, that Muller, who now sells larger pieces made from Mini Coopers and the like for as much as $200,000, is hard-pressed to describe his creative process. Nevertheless, we asked him to try.