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NEW YORK - Dining at an art museum usually means a soup-and-salad lunch buffet. These days, however, new and revamped art temples include top-rated restaurants with sexy cocktail lounges and stunning dining rooms. It is as if cuisine is the newest genre of fine art.
The Modern at MoMA is one example.
With renowned restaurateur Danny Meyer at the helm, the Modern plays in an elite league. Others well known include London's Design Museum Blueprint Cafe and the restaurant run by world-class chef Josean Martinez Alija at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Also, the restaurant Pikayo in the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico ranks high among San Juan dining experiences.
The trend represents "recognition that there's a huge intersection between people who appreciate art and food," says Meyer, who considers himself among them. "It makes perfect sense," he adds. "If hotels, casinos and other public venues recognize the drawing power (of fine dining), why would museums want to excuse themselves?"
Partly because design challenges make the marriage difficult. By their very nature, kitchens with high humidity and grease in the air are anathema to galleries with one-of-a-kind, often fragile, works. That's why so many museums, such as the Mansion Cafe at the Nasher Sculpture Garden, offer food prepared off premises.
Easy access with a separate street level entrance distinguishes the Modern from many other museum eateries, including Seventeen Seventeen, the restaurant of the Dallas Museum of Art. In a way, Seventeen Seventeen was ahead of its time, supplanting a soup-and-salad buffet with full-service fine dining when it opened in 1996. Although lunch is available weekdays with a Sunday brunch, dinner is by special arrangement only. There is a kitchen on DMA premises. Likewise, Cafe Modern at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth also has cooking facilities on site. Service there is limited to lunch, snacks and Sunday brunch.
Because of the numbers of dining venues, there had to be a kitchen at MoMA, to provide food for the Modern (main dining room), adjacent Bar Room and three cafes on different levels of the multistory midtown museum. This created major engineering and design challenges, particularly venting to provide fresh, properly humidified air to the galleries without the odors and grease that are a natural part of a kitchen environment.
Dining rooms are thoughtfully designed with minimal decoration in the Bauhaus style of the original museum building with the vision of principal designer Peter Bentel.
Explained Meyer, "I said no art (in the dining areas). Let's let the museum be the museum." The Modern dining room exemplifies this principle. Done in soft neutral colors, the formal dining room fades to background with visual focus on the outdoor sculpture garden, which it overlooks. At night, the effect is stunning.
The Bar Room is a more casual dining venue, with a 46-foot marble bar and glass wine wall that holds more than 2,000 bottles. The museum also recently opened a gelato bar in the Sculpture Garden in collaboration with Il Laboratorio del Gelato, a popular Manhattan ice cream shop.
Chef Gabriel Kreuther's resume includes a recent stint at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South. His cuisine contains mostly subtle expressions of his French Alsatian heritage. For example, he serves wild salmon with a horseradish crust, cabbage and a Riesling sauce. The menu also offers typically country French ingredients such as sweetbreads, tripe and wild game. Upscale offerings such as lamb, foie gras, Arctic char tartare and tuna carpaccio give it a typically New York flair as well.
As a successful restaurateur - notably Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and Blue Smoke - Meyer insisted that the bar and restaurant have their own street level entrance. In other words, guests don't have to go through the museum although they can easily access the museum from the restaurant.
The idea, says Meyer, is for "the Modern to be a destination restaurant (and bar) for New York and an amenity for museum-goers."
Integrating dining areas with the museum is Meyer's ultimate vision. "When you go to the restaurant, I think you should feel like it belongs here."
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IF YOU GO:
The Modern at MoMA, 9 W. 53rd St.; 212-333-1220.
Hours: Bar Room, 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, to 10:30 p.m. Sunday. The Modern dining room, 5:30 to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations are strongly recommended for the dining room.
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(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
