Welcome to the Artstaurant Era
The food is boring but there's a $20 million sculpture over there.
When Swiss gallerists Hauser & Wirth opened the art-filled restaurant Manuela in Soho last fall, nobody cared about the menu. In New York magazine, Matthew Schneier called the food “perfectly good,” and in Feed Me, J. Lee called it “nothing to write home about.”
But the milquetoast menu didn’t kill the buzz — New Yorkers still wanted to speculate how many tens of millions of dollars the Louise Bourgeois sculpture on the wall was worth, or the probability of running into artists like Stanley Whitney or Cindy Sherman while knocking back a Wellfleet oyster.
