An epicurean pilgrimage should include the art of shopping for food.
Chelsea Market is a well-known destination in west-Chelsea, a super hot area and the current art capital of New York with over 200 galleries, and with lofts out of Architectural Digest. Transforming part of the former National Biscuit Company factory complex, Vandeberg Architects created a long interior arcade of food stores and restaurants, carefully festooned with the detritus of a lost industrial culture. After touring the Chelsea galleries, having a stroll in the urban oasis of the High Line park, a pleasant Saturday ritual is dropping down to the Market to graze and sample, or to stock up on artisanal cheeses, fresh baked crusty breads and great meats, and then having a drink or staying for dinner at the very happening Buddakan, the second wave of Stephen Starr’s well-orchestrated “shock-and-awe campaign” to take culinary Manhattan. The Food Network is next door but not accessible unless one knows someone who works there.
Visitors can sign up for tours of the Market that take approximately 3 hours and include tastings (Foods of New York Tours.)
For another seriously aesthetic food experience in the neighborhood Morimoto would be hard to beat. Owned by Food Network “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto and Steven Starr, it was designed by Pritzker-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Opposite Morimoto across 10th Avenue, also in the Chelsea Market complex is Del Posto, a decadent Italian restaurant owned by fellow “Iron Chef”, Mario Batali.
Eataly – Mario Batali’s homage to Italian food
End of August last year Mario Batali, with partners Joe and Lidia Bastianich, opened the grand, ambitious, sprawling (50,000 square foot) homage to Italian cuisine, Eataly at 200 Fifth Avenue, a comfortable walk from the Chelsea Market along 24th Street. Touted as the largest Italian food and wine marketplace in the world, it includes thematic shopping areas, multiple restaurants, a year-round rooftop beer garden and microbrewery, and a cooking school.
Grand Central Market, inside the wonderfully revitalized Grand Central Terminal, is full of fun and interesting food items like hard-to-find spices, specialty coffee beans, fresh fish, and gourmet chocolates. Grand Central also offers first rate eating in scenic restaurants while watching the world go by, overlooking the 80,000 square foot Main Concourse under the famous “night sky” ceiling.
View of the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal from the Metrazur restaurant
We’ve enjoyed Bellinis at Cipriani Dolci, but Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur on the east balcony and Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse on the north and west balconies also have great views and great reputation for food, while New York’s beloved 90 year old landmark, the Oyster Bar & Restaurant remains the best reason to miss your train.
Grand Central Terminal can also be an art destination. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit program encourages the use of public transit by presenting visual and performing arts projects in subway and commuter rail stations – to be addressed in another series of posts one day.
While I’m in this geographic area I absolutely need to describe one more key restaurant discovery. A couple of blocks east of Grand Central is Sakagura, one of the top sake bar/restaurants in the country. After hard to find, forbidding access in the basement of a nondescript office building, entering the space is like being transported to Japan, to an authentic izakaya, Japanese pub. There are more than 200 kinds of sake! Authenticity and quality define the food as well (no sushi.) The sprawling multi-page menu offers cleanly executed Japanese dishes, most served in small portions and meant to be shared. The whole experience is ritualistic. We were lucky to have the help of a real New York foodie acquaintance, Lisa Mamounas who runs Culinary Insiders, where she combined her love of art and love of food into a foodie-networking organization.
One of Lisa’s greatest pleasures is bringing chefs and artists together for collaborative projects; like uber-chef, uber-restaurateur Daniel Boulud with artist Vik Muniz resulting in 24 artworks for Bar Boulud, or pastry chef Dominique Ansel with artist Will Cotton creating a highly complex ribbon candy headpiece that became the subject of several Ribbon Candy Portraits executed in oil on linen.
Finally, after dwelling at length on the art of food, here is food as art redux:
Will Cotton - "Ribbon Candy Portrait" |
Will Cotton "Cotton Candy Katy"album cover for Teenage Dream |
For an exhibit at the Mary Boone Gallery in Manhattan, Will Cotton painted portraits of models wearing lollipop tiaras and landscapes with gingerbread houses buried in snow banks of fluffy white icing.
Last summer he became a pop-culture phenomenon after transforming the Candy Land board game into the setting for singer Katy Perry’s hilariously over-the-top “California Gurls” music video in which the scantily clad singer traipses through a dream-world of Cotton’s works, past gummy bears and across licorice tightropes, before ascending into cotton-candy clouds.
He currently has an exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, running through February 26, showing a new body of work that merges portraiture, landscape painting, and decadent fashion. Created with the help of fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, and with his pastry chef collaborator Dominique Ansel, it represents Cotton’s interest in the role of bodily decoration as a signifier of status and taste.
Creative Time, a New York based nonprofit with a mandate to present innovative art in the public realm, partnered with the Upper East Side restaurant Park Avenue (Winter) for a series of seasonal artist-chef collaborations. Throughout 2011, four artists—Marina Abramovic, Janine Antoni, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Michael Rakowitz—will collaborate with Park Avenue’s Executive Chef Kevin Lasko.
Launching this new series is Volcano Flambé, a multi-sensory culinary intervention by renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic that leads diners through the physical and spiritual relationship the body has with the ingredients of the dish and the situation in which one experiences them. A unique take on a traditional Baked Alaska, Volcano Flambé exists in three parts: an exclusive take-away collection of Abramovic’s Spirit Cooking Menus; a recorded reading by the artist guiding diners through the experience of the dish through sound; and the decadent dessert itself, set ablaze as it is served. Calling upon all the senses, the work takes diners on a journey of hot and cold, soft and hard, dark and light, and sweet and savory.
Marina Abramovic with Kevin Lasko |
Volcano Flambe |
Marina Abramovic’s Volcano Flambé will be available at Park Avenue (Winter) through March 20, 2011.
And concluding my posts on yet another wonderful stay in NYC, I wanted to add an item I consider fitting with the subject of the art of food.
“…smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose….”
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
This past December, New York’s Museum of Art and Design has opened a new Center of Olfactory Art, headed by former New York Times “smellocrat” Chandler Burr. It features special atomizing machines that release “the work of art.” Let’s see whether boundaries of olfactory interface can be extended to include the aroma of food.
