New York’s art institutions have long flirted with the restaurant business—and a few have already proved the model works. The former Flora Bar at the Met Breuer, Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art have successfully combined beautiful settings with food that runs from good to great. The Met’s Restaurant Associates outpost, however, serves phoned-in fare; the Guggenheim offers a meh sandwich and a Lavazza cappuccino. They’re the kinds of places where you sit when you’re visiting relatives and need a break, so long as it’s before four P.M. But the days of gift-shop-adjacent museum cafés serving dusty scones are numbered. New offerings are raising the bar, starting with the fact that they’ll stay open after museum hours.
Marcel is the buzziest restaurant of the spring, not least because it sits inside the Marcel Breuer building—the landmark brutalist tower on Madison Avenue that now houses Sotheby’s headquarters. The firm Roman and Williams, acting as both designer and restaurateur, has brought its film-set sensibility—and its experience with La Mercerie’s brand of SoHo retailtainment—to the landmarked basement.
