When iconic Dublin restaurant and super pub Café en Seine was totally redesigned and refurbished, Create Security Solutions was called in to provide an extensive but discreet video surveillance system, for the protection of customers and staff. Create worked with Hikvision to design and install a network video system that delivered on Café en Seine’s need for a high quality, aesthetically pleasing security solution.
In the very heart of Dublin’s city centre on Dawson Street lies one of the city’s most iconic and aesthetically stunning venues. Café en Seine, established more than 25 years ago in 1993, has long been a go-to destination for Dubliners and visitors alike. And now its legacy continues, with a brand new redesign, featuring several beautiful dining areas and a host of bars and bespoke event spaces – and a unique indoor Parisian street garden, with room for 250 guests for special events.
Renowned for its five-star service, and described as Dublin’s first ‘super pub’, Café en Seine offers an extensive food menu which caters for a range of tastes and occasions. Head Chef Stephen Gibson and his team provide simple, fun dishes, bursting with seasonal flavours, designed for sharing. It’s a high-end food experience in a casual dining atmosphere.
Unsurprisingly, the team at Café en Seine are also experts when it comes to drinks. The cocktail menu has been specially curated by the team behind Crucible, London to ‘enhance specific moments and experiences within the venue, from the physical surroundings to the music and the service, making each drink memorable’.
Café en Seine is a large space, 1,544 sq. m in area, with the capacity for approximately 1300 people at a time. A project like this is valuable and worth securing. An intelligent video monitoring solution was required in order to protect this innovative new dining experience. To this end, network video security experts Create Security Solutions were called in, and system designers Mark Woods & Niall McDonnell set about devising a system which would address Café en Seine’s specific needs.
Woods, who is Create’s Managing Director, said the system had to be able to deliver a wide variety of results, whilst also blending into the art deco aesthetic of Café en Seine’s redesign. It was required to be able monitor the venue’s till areas, and to record any customer and staff health and safety issues, as well as the conventional function of after-hours surveillance for break-ins or theft.
The solution Create devised was based on network topology using Hikvision H265+ encoding technology, to reduce bandwidth loads. Hikvision’s H.265+ is an optimised encoding technology based on the standard H.265/HEVC compression format. H.265+ video quality is almost equivalent to H.265, but uses far less transmission bandwidth and thus also extends video storage recording capacity.
Create’s Alex Koltunov was lead engineer on the project, and he oversaw the installation of the Hikvision kit. This included the aforementioned 127 cameras, all discreet network mini domes which blend into and complement the interior design of Café en Seine. The cameras record to four 32-channel network video recorders, sited in a comms room three floors above the diners. In the manager’s office is a 32-inch monitor. Using a mouse and switcher, all 127 cameras can be easily and conveniently viewed from here
