When Netflix Became a Canvas: Inside Sadie Rose’s Artwork for Netflix Bites Los Angeles

What happens when television leaves the screen?

For Netflix, the answer in the summer of 2023 involved celebrity chefs, cocktails, an outdoor Los Angeles restaurant, and an ambitious experiment in turning some of the streaming platform's best-known culinary programming into a physical experience.

For Laguna Beach artist Sadie Rose, it also meant transforming porcelain dinnerware and a restaurant wall into works of art.

Rose was commissioned to create artwork for Netflix Bites, Netflix's first-ever restaurant pop-up in Los Angeles. Her contribution included 11 hand-painted porcelain dinner plates as well as a colorful 103-square-foot mural, placing her work directly inside an immersive entertainment experience designed to bring Netflix programming off the television screen and into the real world.

It was the kind of project that sits somewhere between fine art, experiential design, entertainment and hospitality.

And that intersection is increasingly becoming familiar territory for Rose.

Netflix Moves From “Screen to Table”

Netflix Bites opened on June 30, 2023, at the Short Stories Hotel on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.

Netflix described the concept as its first culinary space, bringing together chefs who had become recognizable through programs including Chef's Table, Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend, Nadiya Bakes and Nailed It!.

The participating lineup included culinary figures such as Curtis Stone, Dominique Crenn, Rodney Scott, Ming Tsai, Ann Kim, Nadiya Hussain and Jacques Torres. Netflix's goal was to allow fans to experience something they normally could only watch—to physically taste dishes connected to personalities and shows they knew from the platform.

In many ways, Netflix Bites represented a larger transformation in entertainment.

Audiences increasingly want more than something to watch.

They want something to enter.

Something to photograph.

Something to taste.

Something to share.

Something to remember.

Netflix had already experimented with live extensions of its shows through immersive experiences connected to properties including Bridgerton, Stranger Things and Money Heist. Netflix Bites applied that same thinking to food and dining.

But an immersive experience cannot rely on food alone.

The environment has to tell the story too.

That is where artists and designers become essential.

Sadie Rose Turns the Dinner Plate Into a Canvas

For Netflix Bites, Sadie Rose was given a particularly unusual canvas.

A plate.

More specifically, 11 glazed porcelain dinner plates.

Working with designs supplied by Good All Day Co., Rose hand painted each plate individually, turning the functional dinnerware into artwork connected to the Netflix culinary universe.

Painting on finished porcelain presents a very different challenge from working on stretched canvas.

The surface is smooth and nonporous. Conventional painting techniques do not necessarily behave in the same way they would on canvas, wood or paper.

Rose has described having to work with paint specifically suited to the glazed surface and using a sponge-based application technique to achieve the necessary precision.

That technical limitation became part of the creative challenge.

Artists frequently develop a visual language by mastering a familiar medium.

Projects such as Netflix Bites require the opposite.

Instead of asking the material to conform to the artist, the artist has to understand what the unfamiliar material will allow.

The result was 11 individually painted pieces that functioned simultaneously as branded objects, restaurant decor and small-scale works of art.

Even the original plate design helped reinforce the Netflix Bites concept: the white porcelain featured a distinctive bite-shaped detail, connecting the physical object to the playful identity of the event.

It is difficult to imagine a canvas more appropriate for a project called Netflix Bites.

A 103-Square-Foot Statement

Rose's contribution did not end at the table.

Outside on the restaurant patio, she created a 103-square-foot mural built around the vibrant visual identity of the event. The composition featured a bright pink field contrasted with bold red graphics associated with Netflix programming represented within the restaurant.

The scale completely changed the nature of the assignment.

A porcelain plate asks someone to look closely.

A 103-square-foot mural has to communicate from across a room.

Together, the two projects allowed Rose to work at opposite ends of the visual spectrum.

Small and large.

Detailed and environmental.

Personal and public.

The plates became objects guests could encounter at intimate distance while dining. The mural contributed to the larger atmosphere surrounding them.

That relationship is one of the reasons art matters so much in hospitality design.

When it works well, artwork does not simply decorate a restaurant.

It helps establish where you are.

Creating an Experience Instead of Decorating a Room

Netflix Bites was built around immersion.

The restaurant itself was effectively a translation exercise: take something millions of people know through a screen and turn it into something they can experience physically.

Food accomplished part of that.

Design accomplished another.

Art completed the environment.

A guest could watch a Netflix chef on television one week and then encounter a dish inspired by that world in Los Angeles the next.

The murals, graphics, plates, photography, menus and surrounding visual identity helped connect those experiences.

Rose's artwork became part of that bridge.

This distinction is important.

There is a difference between hanging artwork inside a branded environment and creating artwork specifically for that environment.

The second requires an artist to consider how the work communicates with architecture, food, branding, lighting, photography and the people moving through the space.

It is not simply about creating a beautiful object.

It is about helping create a world.

Where Fine Art Meets Hospitality

That ability to move between gallery art and commercial environments has become one of the more interesting elements of Sadie Rose's career.

Rose is a contemporary artist based in Laguna Beach, California. Her primary practice explores modern surrealism by combining elements of realism and abstraction to construct dreamlike environments.

She earned her BFA from California Institute of the Arts and has developed a body of work encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, painted fashion pieces, murals and experiential commissions.

Her hospitality-related projects extend beyond Netflix.

Her professional history includes commissioned artwork for MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay and Palms in Las Vegas, along with Electric Sun Gaze, a site-specific mixed-media animation created for VEA, a Marriott Resort in Newport Beach. She later created work for the Durango Casino High Stakes Room in Las Vegas.

Seen in that context, Netflix Bites becomes part of a larger progression.

Rose's artwork increasingly exists in environments where people are doing something else at the same time.

They are traveling.

Eating.

Listening to music.

Attending an event.

Watching basketball.

Walking through a hotel.

Art becomes embedded within an experience rather than separated from it.

From Netflix Bites to the NBA

The Netflix project also looks particularly interesting when viewed alongside where Rose's career went next.

In July 2025, she opened the Sadie Rose Art Gallery in Laguna Beach, creating an artist-run gallery and working studio dedicated to her work.

Then in 2026, the NBA selected her as one of 10 Southern California artists for its inaugural NBA All-Star Art Garden during All-Star Weekend at Intuit Dome.

Her sculpture for the NBA, titled “Within,” took a real basketball jersey and transformed it into a life-size sculptural artwork exploring identity, ambition and the internal world behind athletic achievement.

At first, painting Netflix dinner plates and creating a sculpture for NBA All-Star Weekend might appear to have very little in common.

Look more closely and there is a clear connection.

Both projects asked an artist to work with an object deeply associated with another cultural world.

For Netflix Bites, it was the dinner plate.

For the NBA, it was the basketball jersey.

In both cases, Rose transformed the familiar object into something viewers were invited to experience differently.

That ability to move between mediums without abandoning artistic identity is increasingly important for contemporary artists.

The Value of Saying Yes to an Unusual Canvas

Artists are often associated with a specific material.

Oil painter.

Sculptor.

Muralist.

Illustrator.

But some of the most interesting projects appear when those boundaries become less rigid.

A porcelain plate may not immediately sound like the beginning of an important artistic commission.

Neither does a restaurant wall associated with a streaming company.

Yet Netflix Bites placed Rose's work inside a cultural event covered by major media outlets and experienced by visitors who may never have discovered the same artist by walking into a traditional gallery.

Netflix Bites itself attracted significant attention as the streaming company experimented with moving its entertainment properties into physical spaces. The Los Angeles pop-up became Netflix's first restaurant concept, opening at the Short Stories Hotel near The Grove and Farmers Market.

For an artist, that type of environment provides a different relationship with an audience.

Someone does not have to decide, I'm going to look at art today.

They encounter it naturally.

Maybe while waiting for dinner.

Maybe while photographing the patio.

Maybe when they notice that the plate in front of them is unlike anything they expected.

That surprise has value.

Laguna Beach Roots, Expanding Canvas

Today, Rose continues to create from Laguna Beach, a city whose artistic identity has long been intertwined with galleries, working artists and Southern California's creative culture.

The Sadie Rose Art Gallery gives that practice a physical home.

But projects such as Netflix Bites demonstrate that the boundaries of that studio can extend far beyond Laguna Beach.

A restaurant in Los Angeles can become a canvas.

A porcelain dinner plate can become an artwork.

A luxury hotel can become an exhibition space.

A basketball jersey can become a sculpture.

And an artist's career can develop not by choosing between fine art and cultural collaboration, but by finding interesting ways for the two to meet.

Netflix Bites was an early example of that philosophy on a highly visible stage.

Eleven hand-painted plates.

One 103-square-foot mural.

One unconventional commission.

And another step in a career increasingly defined by a willingness to create art where people may least expect to find it.