The hot restaurant color of 2011? Red!

Every era has its own distinctive palette of colors, and restaurants tend to reflect those shades. The popular restaurant decorative shades of the 1970s, for example, happened to reflect the most popular wine of that decade: the pinky rose blush of white zinfandel. Yeah, there’s no accounting for taste.

The restaurants of the following decade played around with variations of bottle green and dark woodwork (it was considered “clubby”), mustard yellow, and taupe. White is also a defining color — Crown Center’s Crystal Pavilion (now known as Milano) was a good example — and doesn’t fall out of fashion as quickly as, say, teal.

But red, according to a story on the Wall Street Journal’s website, is back in a big way.