Manuela Is a Farm-to-Table Gallery For Hungry Collectors

Starving-artist clichés aside, most of the artists I know love to eat. Hard to swing an art handler at Lucien or the Odeon without knocking over at least one or two others. Many of them even love to cook, and since the dawn of the gallery scene, a number of them have used the restaurant as their canvas, from FOOD, where the avant-garde architect Gordon Matta-Clark used to dish out frogs’ legs in the ’70s, through Rirkrit Tiravanija’s ’90s restaurants-as-happenings, curry cooked out of 303 Gallery for all and sundry. (Tiravanija and his erstwhile gallerist Gavin Brown followed them up with the small restaurant Unclebrother upstate, and Lucien Smith — not the same Lucien as the restaurant — is planning to revive FOOD in Chinatown sometime soon.)

Manuela, which opened in October, is stuffed with art that climbs up the walls, Royal Academy style, and often with artists. My first night there, I clocked the great colorist Stanley Whitney a few tables away; another night, Cindy Sherman dined with former Harper’s Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey. But Manuela is not an artist’s restaurant. It’s a rarer thing: a collector’s restaurant. Though it has had, in its first months, the zippy energy of a room-scanning, air-kissing opening, its pitch feels directed less toward celebrating its makers than cosseting its clientele.

Manuela comes from the Swiss megadealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth, whose Hauser & Wirth gallery has four locations in the city and 17 more worldwide. Common parentage and name notwithstanding, the Wirths are at pains to distinguish their eating-and-drinking ventures from their art ones; Manuela, the restaurant, technically comes from Artfarm, their hospitality business, but it is lavishly appointed with works from Hauser & Wirth’s stable of artists and estates: the giant Louise Bourgeois spider and the Philip Guston moonscape, a Picasso-ish double portrait by George Condo, not to mention the fabulous vine of discarded-plastic mushrooms that snakes over the bar, a commission from the New York–based Argentine artist Mika Rottenberg. It is not, strictly speaking, a gallery; nothing here is for sale besides lunch and dinner. Still, for the blue-chip customer, accustomed to always being right, this may come as a surprise. “A lady tried to buy the Guston,” our server confided. “I thought, Are you gonna tip on that?”

The Guston stayed, though interested parties may be directed to the gallery for other inquiries. (The nearest Hauser & Wirth is 250 feet away, right around the corner.) Despite that, there’s an appreciable lack of salesiness about the restaurant, which fits, given that its namesake, as Iwan once told Vogue, “is useless as a salesperson.” Staffers are briefed on the on-site works. Ours treated us to a little tour of the private back room, whose centerpiece is a monumental mosaic table by Rashid Johnson, who will have a mid-career survey at the Guggenheim in April. But they only turn docent when asked. The art looms, but quietly, spoken of if spoken to. It’s taken here  — as it is at plenty of other New York restaurants, where a trophy piece presides over the bar or the dining room  — as a given. It only stands to reason that a Rita Ackermann mural would be appetizing.

Oh, right — the food. If I have given short shrift to the actual stuff of restauranting, that may suggest where the emphasis is ultimately placed. In the hands of Sean Froedtert, Manuela’s menu, which is billed as “seasonal modern American,” is perfectly good. It just doesn’t rise past the level of many of its competitors in a busy field. Manuela has a crowd-tested smoothness. A lot of what it offers is exactly what you would expect it to, a mid-career survey itself of localish seasonal eateries. There is a $26 steak tartare in a town, even a neighborhood, where you could go door-to-door eating $26 steak tartares till you dropped. The de rigueur salad of the season, a palette of rosy chicories with a pungent cheese and a nut, is here, as are two oyster preparations: raw, with finely diced Granny Smith apples, and coal-roasted (the hotter option, in every sense, at a moment when suddenly everyone seems to want to cook their oysters) with Jimmy Nardello butter (the status pepper). A half-chicken and a shareable steak.

None of them are bad! And some are quite good. Dishes like roast chicken  — here in a mayonnaise-y pool of white barbecue sauce and a Joan Mitchell swoosh of orange chile oil  — are comfort eats, easy to order and easy to enjoy. Maybe too easy. Many dishes I sampled at Manuela were saucy but simple, less creative than their surroundings. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy dragging a bit of monkfish through a lobster-scented sauce Américaine or scallops through a puddle of preserved lemon. Is comfort a crime? I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, decline an order of cream biscuits, served with a few sheets of thin country ham and its own glob of “Steen’s butter,” spiked with cane syrup. Like the famous Neiman Marcus popovers, they’re a folksy touch at both Manuelas  — the eight-year-old L.A. original and now the New York cousin. Nothing works up an appetite like shopping, or the promise of it.

But do they rise to the level of the art all around them? Something to think about over a scoop of fig-leaf ice cream with burnt honey or a vivid-purple Concord-grape sorbet. The trouble with treating your restaurant like a gallery is that, inevitably, people will treat your gallery like a restaurant and judge  — or act  — accordingly. One tourist, our server whispered, had the temerity to bring in her kids, who whipped out their favorite plaything in dangerous proximity. “Don’t get slime on the Nicolas Party, please, please,” he prayed.