Alice Waters Helps a Museum Cater to the Tastes of Art Lovers
Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, clinks glasses with David Tanis, the chef of Lulu, and Ms. Waters, who conceived the restaurant. Credit: Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times As the Hammer Museum emerges from last year’s pandemic shutdown, it has assembled a lineup of big names that it hopes will draw crowds back to its campus down the street from the University of California, Los Angeles: Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec. And Waters.
That would be Alice Waters, the restaurateur who founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley 50 years ago and went on to help define modern California cuisine. She is lending her name and reputation to Lulu, a new restaurant she has helped open in the courtyard of the Hammer, the first time she has associated herself so closely with a restaurant since opening Chez Panisse.
“It will bring people who wouldn’t be museumgoers to the museum,” said Ann Philbin, the executive director of the Hammer, who recruited Ms. Waters for this project. “It is about cross-pollination of audiences.”
The Hammer, which is affiliated with U.C.L.A., is the latest in a long line of arts institutions collaborating with big-name chefs in the hopes of expanding their audiences. And Ms. Waters is the latest in a long line of celebrity restaurateurs (for the record, she hates the phrase, preferring the French “restauratrice”) to lend her name to a cultural institution.
But as institutions like the Hammer confront the challenges of trying to emerge from the pandemic, these kinds of partnerships, which were once a fun fillip for patrons spending an afternoon at a museum or an evening at a concert hall, are taking on new urgency.
These past 20 months have shown that an opera, play or art exhibition can be enjoyed from a living room. Fine dining, on the other hand, cannot be streamed, and museums are seeing the proof of that in the lines of people clamoring for a table at their high-end restaurants.
“People have said to me they came because they heard about the restaurant, and when they went through the lobby of the museum, they were excited by what they saw and came back,” said Gary Tinterow, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which opened Le Jardinier, an ambitious, and acclaimed, French restaurant this year with a menu overseen by Alain Verzeroli, a Michelin-starred chef. — Adam Nagourney, Nov. 27, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times website.
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