Mika Rottenberg’s bar and chandalier at Manuela.
Photo: Jeremy Liebman
“Color is so important,” says Ewan Venters, CEO of the globe-spanning megagallery Hauser & Wirth and its hospitality offshoot, Artfarm. He’s here in New York to try a handful of dishes at Artfarm’s first restaurant in the city, Manuela. Our forks hover over large flat oyster mushrooms that stretch across our plates like soft-shell crabs. They have been shallow-fried to a mahogany shade and served over an emulsion of charred mushrooms and black vinegar. We each take a bite — mine is earthy and rich and reminds me of a pan-fried dumpling — and Venters likes his so much that he’s willing to overlook its monochromatic presentation.
Manuela arrives in Soho 53 years after a trio of artists opened the commune-as-restaurant Food, where sculptor and filmmaker friends served dinner from giant vats to the likes of John Cage and Trisha Brown. Manuela takes its name from Manuela Wirth, and is a companion to the Los Angeles restaurant of the same name. By the look of things, Manuela will cater to a crowd that occupies a slightly different tax bracket than Food did. Still, comparisons are inevitable. The menu will be nothing like the $4 meals of marrowbones and frogs’ legs that artist Gordon Matta-Clark served back in the ’70s, through which Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant Hisachika Takahashi drilled holes so diners could wear leftovers home (Matta-Clark’s estate is represented by David Zwirner, besides): Head chef Sean Froedtert’s menu is instead built around local produce and sustainable seafood. A grilled column of swordfish is brushed with sumac and topped with a punchy relish of guindilla peppers and black olives; spears of okra get a loose jacket of char on a wood-burning grill, then land on a garlic-feta spread with a concentrated, nutty chermoula crisp on top; hamachi crudo dusted with a confetti of dehydrated fermented chiles, with lime, Thai-basil buds, and wedges of ripe pluots, conjures the perfection of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Photo: Jeremy Liebman
The food is uniformly and almost disarmingly fresh, unfussy but thoughtfully composed, a little L.A., or even Berkeley. “We talked about avoiding things like tableside pours,” says Kris Tominaga, Artfarm’s culinary director. Katerine Morales Ordoñez, most recently at Jupiter and Sailor, will lead the pastry program with dishes like housemade ice cream topped with honey from a neighborhood hive.
Kappo Masa this is not: Everything is à la carte, and “interventions” fill the cavernous dining room, such as a rambling twist of mushrooms and branches above the bar by Mika Rottenberg, chairs designed by Matthew Day Jackson, an enormous Pat Steir in a private room, and tables by Mary Heilmann. In stark relief to the rest of the neighborhood — including the Hauser & Wirth gallery up the block — nothing in the dining room is meant to be for sale. Instead, Venters says the goal is to “democratize showing art.” (Every day, he says, 500 people pass through another Artfarm property in London, the Audley, where a hand-painted Phyllida Barlow paper collage looms.)
The Soho of 1971, when Food opened its doors, was a parable for the way neighborhoods in New York City could evolve, an industrial zone left empty by white flight and city politicians. Some 600 families — mostly artists — lived illegally in manufacturing lofts and pooled a few hundred dollars to feed one another in between exhibitions. It was definitionally avant-garde, wild, and transgressive. Today’s Soho is a center of luxury commerce, so it makes sense that Manuela was never meant to be a direct homage to Food. But it is designed to nod to the connection artists have always had with restaurants, from Thiebaud still lifes to La Colombe d’Or, where an Alexander Calder lives over the pool, and bartered works from Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky hang. “It’s all about the magic of people and who’s in the room,” Venters says. “Where the artists go, everyone follows.”
This post has been updated.
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