Go for the van Gogh, but Stay for the Smoked Eel With Jalapeño

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: March 29, 2006 in the New York Times

AT the Mitsitam Cafe in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, food has become an extension of the collection. Salmon cakes reflect life in the Pacific Northwest, and buffalo burgers echo the diet of the Great Plains Indians. Even its name is educational. Mitsitam means "let's eat" in the language of the Piscataway and the Delaware people.

At the Portola restaurant at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, diners eat seafood caught in environmentally conscious ways and leave with a pocket guide on buying fish that are not endangered.

The lesson at the new de Young Museum in San Francisco concerns local artisan food. Most of it was caught, grown or produced close by, and the chef works to turn Sonoma cheese, heirloom tomatoes and king salmon into art on a plate.

Fifty years ago, the idea that a museum would put that much thought into what to feed visitors would have seemed absurd. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first large cafeteria in 1954, it did so grudgingly. Museums were for art and science and history. Restaurants were for eating.

But smart travelers have long realized that some of the best food at a good price in Europe can be found in museums like the Louvre, the Tate, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the House for an Art Lover in Glasgow. Only in the last couple of decades has museum food in the United States evolved to match the quality and themes of its surroundings. Besides being a reliable moneymaker, feeding museumgoers has become a culinary specialty, with chefs seeking the approval of restaurant critics.

The results are mixed. Some museums focus more on setting and theme food than on haute cuisine. The Spy City Cafe in the International Spy Museum in Washington sells an Eastern Bloc hot dog with mustard, sauerkraut and fried onions in a room decorated with spy maps.

On the other end of the spectrum are gems like the Japanese-influenced Cornell Cafe in the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Fla., and the stunning white-tablecloth restaurants with hard-to-get reservations, like the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Food has become one more way to judge a museum.

"It tells you a lot about the museum's perception of the public," said Daphne Dervin, director of programs at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in the Hudson Valley, and a former curator at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, Calif.

Ms. Dervin has seen children's museums with vending machines serving junk food. During a recent tea break at a casual cafe inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was appalled that the tea was served in paper cups and the milk was set out in the original carton.

"The art we had just walked by was certainly worthy of a pitcher for the milk, at least," she said.

Some curators and conservators, however, say they prefer to keep the focus on the exhibitions. They worry that mixing leisurely eating with art can lead to incidents like the one at a recent cocktail event at the Milwaukee Art Museum. By the end of the night, food, drink and debris were left on and around some of the artwork, said people who were there.

"For years, no one wanted you eating around the art," said Ben Katchor, the New York artist and cartoonist, who has long studied changes in museum cafeteria culture, putting together a slide show of drawings that has been presented as a satirical lecture on both coasts.

The museum cafeterias where Mr. Katchor ate as a young artist in the 1970's were intended to give students and art lovers an inexpensive place to take a quick break. "They were just places to get away from the paintings," he said. "They barely functioned as eating places. Now they're destinations. And if they're destinations, then they are competing with the art. I don't know if that's good or bad."

He added, "Looking at paintings on the wall isn't central to culture at all much anymore, so maybe it makes sense to go there to eat and shop."

Food operations have become solidly profitable for museums. Some concessionaires pay back as much as 25 percent of their gross revenue to the museum. Chains like McDonald's, Taco Bell and Starbucks have all found concessions in museums profitable. But money is not the only factor driving changes. People have less leisure time and, more and more, seem to be compressing several activities into one outing.

And since the American food revolution of the 80's, when celebrity chefs were born and people began using restaurants as a full evening's entertainment, the dining experience at museums has begun to matter. Chefs have also realized that museums are ideal showcases for food. Wolfgang Puck's catering company prepares food at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where his chefs at the high-end restaurant 20.21 prepare Asian-inspired California cuisine.

The food operations at the Museum of Modern Art may be the most forward-thinking, trying to nurture someone whose head and heart is filled with art. When Marc Aumont, the executive pastry chef for the restaurant group operating MoMA's food services, was designing desserts for Terrace 5, a fifth-floor cafe, he considered its setting among a maze of galleries exploring Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. What would someone want to eat after gorging on Cézannes, van Goghs and Dalís?

Rather than trying to impress the diner with the creativity of Picasso, he focused on desserts that were aesthetically perfect but not complicated: a chocolate torte and ice cream flavored with caramel and coffee.

"We wanted to refresh the body, to provide a restorative break that would not challenge the diner's intellect," said Danny Meyer, Mr. Aumont's boss and the New York restaurateur who took on all the restaurants in the new museum.

People who need something more substantial can eat at Cafe 2, the museum's main dining spot, with the ambience of a Roman-style cafeteria called a rottiseria, where diners enjoy small plates of cured meats, salads made with arugula and beets, and simple pastas. Or they can choose the Modern, whose main dining room and stylish bar operate adjacent to the museum and for longer hours, drawing a mix of museumgoers and people coming in off the street. Diners can spend hours over a meal prepared by the chef, Gabriel Kreuther, who might serve complex dishes like chorizo-crusted cod, smoked eel spiked with jalapeño or poached egg and cockles.

Mr. Aumont, the pastry chef, finds inspiration working near all that art, especially a Picasso cast-bronze piece called "She-Goat" in the sculpture garden just outside the Modern dining room.

"You are a victim of what you listen to and see," he likes to say.

"It inspires you, this goat," he said. "The simplicity, the strength. You want to know, what was Picasso thinking?"

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