A museum is all about curation. It now seems that a museum restaurant should also be curated, at least according to chef Corey Lee, who had an inspired concept for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s new flagship eatery. At In Situ, every dish is from the menu of a top culinary outpost elsewhere. For instance, the restaurant’s changing menu might include Wylie Dufresne’s shrimp grits from New York’s wd~50 and a dessert of wood sorrel and sheep-milk yogurt by René Redzepi from Copenhagen’s Noma. Given the eclectic origins of the offerings, the backdrop could have defaulted to a gallery-like sterility. But local firm Aidlin Darling Design created a space that is very much in situ, with subtle details that delight the visual palate.
SFMOMA recently unveiled a major addition and renovation by Snøhetta, which located the 6,300-square-foot restaurant in former café and event spaces off the lobby of the original 1995 Mario Botta building. The dark-toned room smoothly segues from the museum’s entry, which has a black and gray granite floor. According to chef Lee, “I didn’t want the space to feel like a typical restaurant, but an extension of the museum where food happened to be served.”
Inside, the floor is concrete, the ceiling is black expanded metal mesh, and the walls are finished in white paint, dark gray acoustic felt, and cement scratch coat. “The idea was to create a raw shell, with a mediating layer, and a few carefully placed elements,” says principal David Darling, so “the food becomes the final art in the space.”
Custom-crafted furnishings reinforce the artful qualities. Inspired by the rough-hewn work of British sculptor David Nash, bar-height tables made from salvaged cottonwood have craggy undersides that speak to San Francisco’s penchant for natural wood, without devolving into cliché. Overhead, slender blackened-steel pipe pendants are an homage to The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria. An expansive ceiling installation of wood slats by the architects is a riff on a food-drying rack.
In keeping with the museum’s mission of making art accessible, the architects devised a range of casual seating areas for 130 people (two-thirds of the space is for walk-in customers). In addition to the bar tables, there is a low-slung lounge as well a long window seat that overlooks the street. The dining area features simple tables with ash tops and sculptural Osso chairs by Paris-based designers Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec. Partially screened by a wall clad in cold-rolled steel plate, the kitchen provides glimpses of the craft involved in creating edible works of art.
