When you visit a museum, you allow yourself to learn, be intellectually stimulated, and enrich your understanding of the present by learning more about the past. Museums are beautiful, critical places full of abundant potential and opportunities.
However, one thing they lack is dining options. A museum venture is often cut short simply because visitors are hungry and need something more substantial than a snack. Thanks to a bold innovation, that may soon change.
An exciting new restaurant will anchor the New Museum as part of the property’s overhaul and 60,000-square-foot expansion, set to reopen this fall. The Oberon Group, known for notable Brooklyn wine bars and restaurants like Rucola, Rhodora, and June, is partnering with chef Julia Sherman.
Sherman is widely recognized and celebrated for blending the food and art worlds. This makes her an ideal fit for this new culinary venture, which aims to provide a museum-like experience for your taste buds and mind. While the restaurant does not yet have a public name, it is expected to open alongside the Lower East Side Museum’s relaunch later this year.
The Intersection of Art and Food
“There are so many opportunities to be creative and playful in a space that otherwise has a predetermined choreography most of the time.” The team has commissioned two new works for the space: artist Ian Cheng’s installation and designer Minjae Kim’s custom furnishings.
Sherman is an ideal candidate to conceptualize a museum restaurant. Over the years, she has collaborated with numerous museums and galleries, including building a salad garden at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA PS1 a decade ago.
Sherman is also the author of the cookbooks Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists and Arty Parties: An Entertaining Cookbook, which showcase her network of creative colleagues that dates back to her time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Oberon Group’s founder, Henry Rich, said he had won the request for proposal (RFP) about four years ago. However, this is not his first museum project, having opened Clara at the New York Historical Society on the Upper West Side in 2023.
For Museum Patrons and Beyond
The upcoming dining space at the New Museum is designed to engage the broader Downtown art community. It focuses on offering accessible, appealing cuisine in a welcoming, uncomplicated setting. Access will be open to everyone without requiring a museum ticket. A chef who directs artist partnerships will lead the culinary and artistic programming.
An artistic lens will extend to the New Museum space’s smallest details. It follows the tradition of artist-run venues, such as the relaunch of a 1970s restaurant in Chinatown by artist Lucien Smith in collaboration with Gordon Matta-Clark’s estate.
It’s not just in the plating, “the line drawing that reveals itself on a plate once the food has been eaten, the artwork on the food and cocktail menu, the etching on the water glass, and the mail art postcard you get at the end of the meal that you can write and send from the restaurant,” Sherman concluded.
