Dinner Through the Gift Shop

The dining room at Marcel, inside Sotheby’s Breuer-building headquarters.

New York’s art institutions—from Sotheby’s to the Met—are getting into the restaurant business, and finally making it worth staying after dark

By Christine Muhlke

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. READ ON