Rasa
RESTAURANT + BAR
A 75-seat dining room and full cocktail bar serving South Indian, North Indian, and Indo-Chinese cooking, with a daily lunch buffet. All halal, prepared from scratch.
rasa Bringing Bangor Its First Full Indian Dining Room
Ervin Architecture was brought in by the Guntaka family to convert a downtown Bangor office building into a restaurant. The building at 175 Exchange Street went up in the 1980s and spent its entire life leased to professional office tenants — private suites, corridors, desk work. Not one of them cooked a meal. Rasa Indian Cuisine opened on March 29, 2026 as the building’s first hospitality tenant in forty years.
Fitting a full restaurant into 2,000 square feet of former office space is a change of occupancy classification, from Business to Assembly, and everything that classification touches had to be reopened: how many people the exits can release, how many plumbing fixtures the building owes them, and how a commercial kitchen exhausts through a structure that was never built to carry one. The finished room seats 75 including the bar, and almost none of that work is visible in it — which is the point.
Location
Bangor, Maine
STYLE
Contemporary
CATEGORY
Commercial
Restaurants + Bars
Nightclubs
Performance Venues
Restaurants + Bars
Nightclubs
Performance Venues
Services
Architectural Design
Interior Design
Master Planning
Permitting
Lighting Design
Fabrication
PROJECT SIZE
2,000 FT² / 186 M²
project COLLABORATIONS
wallpaper
Astek, California Wallpaper, Painted Paper
BAR CLADDING
WoodyWalls
Architectural Lighting
Erik Milles, Reflex Lighting Group North
Lighting
LightArt, Pablo Designs, NovaFlex
acoustical ceiling
Armstrong
Decorative Ceiling
Marlite
furniture
WEST ELM
SIGNAGE
Da Vinci Signs
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography: Garrett Rowland
Videography: Harry & Lyss Productions
in the press
New Indian restaurant coming to Bangor this fall
by Annie Rupertus
“Bangor’s restaurant scene is growing this fall."
by Annie Rupertus
Inspired Design
"{Rasa} is stunning .... Come and experience the magic designed and built by Ervin Architecture..."
Owner + Restaurateur
Project story
Rasa Restaurant Design Inspiration
Ervin Architecture continues to add consequential and original design projects to the Maine culinary landscape with Rasa Restaurant, an Indian restaurant in the heart of Bangor’s revitalized downtown.
Rasa is a space of subtlety and sophistication, where woven textures, contemporary forms, and striking material selections create an ambience of elegance and ease that is authentically Indian.
Rob Ervin of Ervin Architecture, along with restaurateur Sai Reddy of Taj in South Portland, found the space after several other locations around Bangor fell short. It occupies the prow of a brick-veneer building put up for the Maliseet in the 1980s, overlooking Exchange Street.
For decades it served as office space — designed for cubicles and coffee, and built accordingly: undersized electrical service, inadequate water and sewer, and a labyrinth of winding hallways framed by shoddy partitions. A gut renovation was the only way forward. But the location sat in Bangor’s walkable downtown with adequate off-street parking, and the dining room came with 180 degrees of wraparound glass. The cost to convert was outweighed by the operational upside.
Rasa opened in spring 2026 to a strong reception. The design does two jobs at once. By day, bright textures and full southern light suit the lunch buffet crowd. At night the lights come down and the room changes character entirely — one of downtown Bangor’s better date-night rooms.