If there is one restaurant design trend that I object to, it's the hanging of dozens of bare old-fashioned bulbs like this in Toronto's Guu Izakaya. They take the most inefficient bulbs one can find and cover the ceiling with them. I admit that it looks terrific, and that people really look good under the warm bulbs. But it is so wasteful.

Edison Light Globes

It no longer has to be that way. Australian lighting company Edison Light Globes has introduced a line of LED bulbs that look like an old-fashioned Edison incandescent, burning 5 watts instead of 45.

The shaped glass is exactly like a traditional standard round and fits regular light fittings with good representation of colors. Therefore the bulb is fantastic for atmospheric lighting, in a multi-bulb pendant light, as well as discreet lighting.

It has a very warm vintage color at 2200 Kelvin, (normal incandescent bulbs are 2700K, so these are really warm.) At 375 lumens these are decorative rather than effective light sources, but I bet filling a ceiling with them would look terrific. They have a color rendition index of a ridiculously high 94.9, (incandescents are 100, the LEDs in my house are about 80) these are as close to incandescent as any LED I have seen.

I count 40 bulbs in that Guu photo above; that's 2 kilowatts of power savings that could come off the electric bill and the air conditioning load in that example. I really think that even for theatrical, atmospheric installations like this, the incandescent bulb is truly dead.

Edison Light Globes

So now all the steampunk kids can go LED, with these very cool warm bulbs from Edison Light Globes Found on PSFK, which actually doesn't show a single photo with an LED bulb.