The Art of the Meal

Two chic new restaurants—The Wright and Robert—have redefined museum dining.

Crosstown rivalries are the stuff of New York City legend, but few urban turf battles have recently been tastier—or chicer—than the one brewing between the new museum restaurants Robert and The Wright. Opened over the past two weeks, both restaurants not only boast namesake monikers, they're also housed in prime Central Park addresses with a pair of Manhattan’s most important cultural destinations as landlords. Robert—-named after the legendary New York party planner Robert Isabell, who died this year—is in the 18-month-old Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle, while The Wright makes its home in the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum some 30 blocks north.

Click Image Below to View Our Gallery of The Wright and Robert

But in foodie-fanatic New York, the timing of the two glamorous museum restaurants’ arrival offers an unusual opportunity for some culinary comparing-and-contrasting. At their core, both restaurants share a similar sense of design DNA. Each, for instance, is giving new life to existing ho-hum spaces—The Wright in the Guggenheim’s tired ground-level cafe, Robert in a disused cocktail lounge on the ninth floor of architect Edward Durrell’s iconic 1964 Two Columbus Circle.

Equally key is each restaurant’s ingenious use of art, architecture, and design as creative complements to both their iconic locations and contemporary cuisines. “We’re not quite sure if we’re like a gallery that serves food,” observes New York architect Andre Kikoski, who designed The Wright as both a much-needed Park-front canteen and to honor the Guggenheim’s 50th anniversary. “Or are we actually a restaurant with gallery-worthy art?”

Perhaps Robert and The Wright are actually a bit of both. On the art front, besides their venues’ own blue-chip collections, each eatery has placed a premium on quality original works. At The Wright, British artist Liam Gillick has created a site-specific sculpture crafted from slim planks of color-coated aluminum that swooshes along the restaurant’s walnut walls and ceilings with Saarinen-like momentum.

Much like the rest of the restaurant, Kikoski says Gillick’s work honors “the fluidity of Wright’s original design, but whereas he went for the heavy and thick outside, we’ve chosen light and thin within.” A white Corian-capped bar and curved blue-leather banquettes complete The Wright’s Wright-inspired futurist aesthetic.

While at Robert—which literally looms over Central Park—art is even more front-and-center. Light is the dominant element at work here, transformed from the ephemeral into the tangible by architect Johanna Grawunder, an Ettore Sottsass protégé based in Milan and San Francisco. She has created an abstract canopy from mobile, hot-pink Lucite panels illuminated from within via LED and suspended above the dining room.