FOOD was a cultural hub and restaurant in the early 1970s on the corner of Prince and Wooster streets in Soho where it blended the rituals of dining with an experimental spirit. Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd crafted performative dishes while the restaurant’s co-founder Carol Goodden turned soups into paintings. In its three-year life, the restaurant saw its other cofounder Gordon Matta-Clark turn bones into necklaces. Today, a norm-pushing edge is a memory in downtown New York’s this pocket of soaring lofts and posh boutiques, but the New Museum remains something of a hub for the bygone avant-garde spirit. The institution’s recent doubling of its exhibition space by OMA has finally made possible an essential that many of peers have long enjoyed: a restaurant.
Oberon opens this week with ninety seats inside the 60,000 square feet expansion in the form of a self-contained black box on the ground floor. Brooklyn-based restaurant group The Oberon operates the eatery with a menu created by chefs Julia Sherman and Ali Ghriskey. The hospitality group’s founder and managing partner Henry Rich sees an opportunity in the New Museum’s alchemy of heritage and a downtown sensibility. “The museum straddles the world of New York institutions and edgy galleries around here,” he tells Wallpaper* and says the non-profit holds a “unicorn position with a stature and a commitment to most forward-looking art.”
The non-collecting museum has held a pivotal role in career-making exhibitions for many global artists, yet it had lacked a proper restaurant throughout its 49-year history—in its first eatery, cork anchors the visual statement. Without a direct contact with Bowery street, the interior wraps its guests as a concentrated experience in which the dominant material appears in five different ways, both in recognizable and distinct qualities.
OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu and associate Jake Forster who oversaw the expansion planned the pocket inside the overall metallic mesh and steel-heavy building to, as Shigematsu puts it, “compliment the rest of the series of gallery spaces.” Besides FOOD, their mood board included the community gardens peppered throughout Soho and Lower East Side. “We looked into communal spaces that have brought artists together and conceived the restaurant as its own volume,” he says. A generous potpourri of plants outline the opaque window which lets museum-goers notice the diners’ silhouettes within the silver leaf cork exterior. Inside, Portuguese company Sofalca created black cork surfaces through a process in which the negative footprint carbon-absorbing material is heated to extreme temperatures and blended with resin to yield large monolithic blocks. A series of textural cork domes which come out of CNC milling overhead booths with serrated cork around their parameters. An intensely textured cork ceiling in the center suspends above around twenty two-seater wooden tables designed by Minjae Kim.
The Brooklyn-based designer says the main challenge in his first restaurant commission was to implement his vision into a fully-baked vision. “I responded to the inventive use of cork and already given design parameters with texture and warmth,” he says. For the 30-foot bar, he summoned the technique of sanding into the grain of ash wood for a distressed rippling texture on lacquer finish. Kim also designed nine quilted fiberglass pendants through a process of running woven fiberglass in a sewing machine for an ornate sculptural effect, in contrast to the sturdy cork-led interior.
The diners who seek out art between meals, such as a classic hamburger and martini pairing, curb their visual appetite with Ian Cheng’s video installation behind the bar. While the New York artist who is known for his contemplate live simulations and real time animations here delivers dancing visuals that beam with a moody energy. In an homage to FOOD’s Fluxus roots, the iconic artist of avant-garde pursuits Laurie Anderson bids the farewell to diners with poems she has penned for the wrappings of parting chocolates.
Steps away from surrounding neighborhood’s bustle, the hermetic culinary experience interprets the cork’s thick hug into sculptural accents, complimented by a textural use of wood and a generous wash of greenery. “We are privileged to cater to a community that already likes to hang out,” says Rich.