The Art of the Meal

What does a museum gain from having an excellent restaurant? And what does a museumgoer get from lingering a little longer to try the food at an establishment whose attraction is categorically something else? These are questions that I confronted head on in an old Wet Paint column, around this time last year, back when Caper was just a glimmer in our founders’ eyes, and when Zoli, Marcel (which both opened this April at Brooklyn exhibition space Amant and auction house Sotheby’s, respectively), and Oberon were just press releases in my inbox. 

I asked around with curators and artists to find out what people really want out of the experience of museum dining (I’m aware that Sotheby’s isn’t a museum, but the Breuer was used as a museum since 1966, so I’m lumping it in with the others). Many museums’ restaurants end up more like tourist traps, but the dining experiences at Café Sabarsky (the Viennese restaurant attached to the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side) and the oceanside Louisiana Café (at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark) came up as goal posts. One curator summarized it succinctly: “I want to feel a moment of reprieve from the fatigue of being in a museum,” she said. “When I feel like I’m still in a museum setting, and not something that could stand alone on its own, I don’t want to linger or return there.”