Museum restaurants put pricey food on display

While Columbia’s “Passport to New York” program mitigates admission fees at many of the city’s premier museums, new restaurants at venerable artistic institutions make enjoying an affordable museum meal impossible on a student budget. With fine dining spots sprouting en masse at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Art and Design, and the Whitney, museums’ haute cuisine displays the potential to compete with, or even eclipse, the art.

Adjacent to the Guggenheim’s spiraling snail-like structure, a restaurant called The Wright opened this past December in a diminutive and cramped space that feels like the interior of some mollusk’s shell. Architect Andre Kikoski fashioned the curving dining room, a starkly white chamber that mirrors the Guggenheim’s form. Art history majors might find Liam Gillick’s installation of rainbow horizontal bars an interesting exploration of color theory, but less erudite diners will scratch their heads and return to puzzling over Chef Rodolfo Contreras’ infinitely confusing and expensive menu.

Contreras trained with acclaimed French chef David Bouley and appears to fuse this haute cuisine background with his Mexican heritage. More often than not, this theme disappears under an unforgivable impulse to pay homage to contemporary, and typically tired, restaurant trends.

An appetizer of seared diver scallop comes paired with shrimp and crab, a mundane combination doused in a creamy sea urchin sauce. While the sensual, even sexual, brininess of the urchin paints a broad stroke on the plate, the entire composition seems trite and five years ago.

Similarly, slow roasted suckling pig accompanied by kumquat, violet mustard, shimeji mushrooms, and apple bacon kowtows to such a plethora of culinary movements that merely charting the dish’s influences is more entertaining than the act of eating it. If only the shredded pork possessed any hint of succulence, if only the cloying bitterness of the kumquat drowned out the shimeji mushrooms’ fungal funkiness. Unfortunately, this misbegotten, ill-conceived love child of chefs Fergus Henderson, Thomas Keller, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten fails to meet even the low expectations of the Guggenheim’s old cafeteria.

Worse yet, after partaking in such pretentious and unoriginal cuisine, students find themselves stuck with a bill multiple times the Museum’s regular ticket price. Perhaps Contreras imagines himself an artist on par with Tino Sehgal, but this menu’s devastating mediocrity overshadows the Guggenheim’s current exhibition.

Robert, the nascent restaurant resting on top of the Museum of Arts & Design at Columbus Circle, amplifies the problems observed at The Wright. A garishly, self-consciously hip restaurant complete with an antibiotic pink color scheme and hypnotic video art displays, Robert appears already destined for failure. In move presumably made to preserve tattered shreds of dignity and career, chef Brady Duhame announced his departure from the venture earlier this month
Even more claustrophobic than The Wright, Robert seems stuck in an identity crisis, offering a menu that leaps from torchon of Hudson Valley foie gras to pan roasted breast of Peking duck without missing a beat. Operating at a price point akin to The Wright, Robert still makes an impression of frenetic desperation. Hamachi sashimi with avocado, pink grapefruit, and grains of paradise is a gesture at the avant-garde that almost succeeds, an exercise in acidic and peppery surrealism. But pastas like a mesmerizingly rubbery pappardelle and a Chef Boyardee-esque swiss chard and sheep’s milk ricotta tortellini disappoint those diners expecting more out of high-class, high fashion food.

Meanwhile, across town at the Whitney, restaurant tycoon Danny Meyer prepares to open another upscale museum restaurant this fall. Currently untitled, this work will replace Sarabeth’s, 20 years old and decidedly unassuming. Transitioning from a homey spot serving just brunch and lunch to an outpost of the Meyer mega chain will almost surely shut out budget-conscious students from another practical museum dining option.

Nevertheless, Meyer’s establishment at the Museum of Modern Art preserves hope that diners will get their money’s worth at the Whitney. At MoMA, Chef Gabriel Kreuther prepares food that complements the artworks, engages the palate, and stimulates the mind. Here, cerebral creations like chorizo-crusted codfish—an ample slice of mild fish topped with sausage slices standing in for scales—and pineapple ‘Chartreuse’—a combination of pineapple slices, buttermilk panna cotta, and herb sorbet that mimics the title liqueur’s flavor and puns on the shape of a crown—epitomize museum cuisine. For MoMA, “museum cuisine” means food that functions within the MoMA’s particular ethos, and that concludes a trip to the museum with an extraordinarily satisfying gastronomic adventure.

As museums cater to a wealthy crowd with increasingly expensive restaurants, students should choose wisely about where to spend their dining dollars. A Passport to New York can only take one so far.