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Can opening a restaurant in a New York museum turn the food into a work of art?
By
Joshua David Stein
Published Nov 4, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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Dave Watts
By
Joshua David Stein
Published Nov 4, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. ET
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On a recent Friday night, in the basement of the towering Brutalist building that was once known as the home of the Whitney Museum, bejeweled women in angular dresses and tan men with perfect stubble cut into delicate turbot and sipped martinis out of hand blown glasses. Long tapered candles flickered, illuminating freshly baked baguettes and mounds of French butter. The tablescape could all have been a Renaissance still life, save for all the life abounding around it.
“This is the poireaux de poire poivre,” announced a white-blazer-clad server to the table next to me, as he delivered a $29 dish of leeks with peppercorn-poached pears on the table. It’s a very elegant tongue-twister, but a tinkle of laughter and bonhomie rose like a mist from the table.
This is Marcel, the glamorous new restaurant named after the architect Marcel Breuer, in whose namesake building it is housed. Opened this spring and operated by Sotheby’s, in partnership with the design firm Roman & Williams, it is just the latest in a wave of restaurants cohabitating with art institutions. Around the city, restaurants are installing themselves like creative barnacles within the walls of galleries, museums and, like Marcel, auction houses.
Tomatoes at Manuela
Kristin Teig
Manuela, a Soho restaurant owned by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, opened in 2024, joined hotspots like Kappo Masa, co-owned by gallerist Larry Gagosian, to offer dinner with a side of blue-chip art. At Manuela, diners enjoy halibut in the shadow of Cindy Sherman, Louis Bourgeois and Philip Guston.
On the Bowery, the shimmering OMA-designed wing of New Museum is home to a buzzy restaurant called Oberon. Across the river, Ned Baldwin’s strange seafood palace Zoli opened within Amant, a sprawling arts campus nestled into the warehouses of East Williamsburg. And in the fall, MoMA PS1 will open a new French-African cafe helmed by the Jamaican-American chef Devonn Francis.
The commingling of art and dinner is nothing new, of course. The Russian Tea Room was founded by members of the Imperial Ballet in 1926, and quickly became a refuge for Picasso and Dali. FOOD, the legendary SoHo restaurant, was an installation project by artist Gordon Matta Clark, and more recently reincarnated by the late artist Lucien Smith. Howard Chandler Christy’s murals at the Cafe des Artistes have survived countless openings and closings. But those were art in restaurants: come for dinner, stay for the decoration. These days the relationship is more symbiotic. Museums depend on restaurants; restaurants on museums: Each nourish the other.
We are in a delicate and tense time for the public museum.
“Museums broadly have been facing a multi-decade decline in attendance,” said Stephen Reily, who heads the think tank ReMuseum, which focuses on promoting innovation in art museums. “COVID was a cliff that some but not all have come back from.”
There’s also new competition. As social-media-forward ersatz museum-ish experiences like the Balloon Museum and the Museum of Ice Cream — neither mission driven nor non-profit — threaten to bodysnatch visitors, public funding has also evaporated. This all leaves administrators looking for ways to bring new bodies into the doors.
“Museums are in a Darwinian moment, an industrial revolution is happening behind the scenes and the toxicity is forcing the moths to change color,” said Rayme Silverberg of Paradigm Shift, a start-up dedicated to safeguarding the financial sustainability of museums.
A restaurant, particularly a well-regarded buzzy one, helps a museum bring in new visitors and reframe itself within a community. Restaurants, meanwhile, are facing rising food costs, rising labor costs, ever increased competition and outrageous rents. Nestling inside a larger institution, especially one with wealthy donors, space to spare and a built-in audience should relieve at least some of that pressure.
Fruits de mer deconstructed at Zoli
Canal House
Plus, you know, it’s fun. At Oberon, for instance, diners can enjoy tomato and stracciatella salads and a roasted half chicken while taking in an agentic AI installation behind the bar under a strange fuzzy roof that looks like the inside of Kenny Powers’ mullet. The comfort food, by Brooklyn stalwart chef Henry Rich of Rucola and Rhodora, seems at odds with the modern art but the frisson is unmistakable. What roasted half chicken with fig leaf and preserved lemon doesn’t taste better under avant-garde light fixtures by Minjae Kim? The after-dinner treats, dark mint chocolates with wrappers designed by artist Laurie Anderson, don’t hurt either. They read, “I was thinking of you. And I was thinking of you. And I was thinking of you. And then I wasn’t thinking of you anymore.”
Each art cantina serves a slightly different purpose. Marcel, where the menu is pricey but nothing compared to the art on the wall, the restaurant is, as Sotheby’s chairman Lisa Dennison told Gothamist, “a natural extension of the Sotheby’s experience. It is a space where our clients, visitors, and the wider community can engage with art in a different and more intimate way, whether they're visiting our galleries, meeting friends for breakfast or lunch, or enjoying dinner surrounded by an array of exceptional works.”
The exceptional works Dennison mentions include a large Willem DeKooning hanging over the banquets. In the vitrines on the way to the restroom, patrons pass Franz Kline’s striking blue Venus statue, a tangle of painted steel by John Chamberlain. Marcel hums along with the pleasant bustle of commerce. The art can be bought (price on request); the omelette can be bought ($34); even the forks, knives, spoons, chairs, and those handmade martini glasses can be purchased ($300), part of the Marcel collection by designers Roman & Williams.
Even if you are among the rare diners who can’t afford a de Kooning, eating among a masterpiece gives just enough of a soupçon of affluence.The ten course tasting menu at The Modern seems pricey at $285, but overlooking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, it's a pittance to cosplay as a plutocrat art patron.
Of course, not all of these spaces swim in the monied deep end of the art world. Zoli, deep in East Williamsburg, is as far away fromthe profit-minded Sotheby’s is to the non-profit Amant. Whereas Marcel’s chef, Marie Rose Aude, channels haute Parisien cuisine, Zoli’s Ned Baldwin goes weird and weirder still. As Baldwin, a trained artist (Yale, MFA, sculpture), explains to me,
“I curate the menu like a group show,” said Balwin
The offerings are eclectic and strange. Duck hearts are skewered and Kombucha-glazed. An oyster lurks inside a beignet. Rock shrimp are served with husk cherries. The steak is bison and smoky; the cheesecake is Taleggio and funky. But it fits the space perfectly. The food is complemented by the three large aquariums full of genetically modified fish, bizarre crustaceans and detritus from Brooklyn canals by the artist Pierre Huyghes that divide the space. Little shrimps silently gaze out at the diners from their installation. Though the experience is less tony and more experimental than Marcel, the feeling is similar: the restaurant and the artist are in symbiotic dance. It is delightfully unclear where the aquarium ends and the red shrimp with husk cherries begin.
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Joshua David Stein
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