WHO doesn’t have childhood memories of field trips to the museum? After a morning of being guided through the paintings and sculptures of the great masters, everyone would head for the basement cafeteria, where you would stand in line, plastic trays in hand, waiting to be treated to a lunch of rubbery chicken and gooey tapioca pudding. Those days are gone, or at least numbered. Increasingly museums are moving away from the middle-school approach to feeding visitors, with its emphasis on a lowest-common-denominator menu, in favor of stylish restaurants that offer fine dining to go with the fine art.
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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Robert, the new restaurant at the Museum of Arts and Design, at 2 Columbus Circle.
Last month sleek new restaurants with sophisticated menus opened in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Arts and Design. The Whitney Museum of American Art has just announced plans to open a new cafe during the second half of this year, to be run by the celebrated restaurateur Danny Meyer, and at least two other smaller art museums in Manhattan are in negotiations to install restaurants or cafes.
The trend, though strong locally, is by no means confined to New York City. In recent years, Wolfgang Puck has partnered in museum restaurants in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Washington, and other high-end dining rooms have opened recently in museums in cities including Toronto and Atlanta.
“More and more over the past five years that is what museums, libraries and even botanical gardens have been demanding,” said Dick Cattani, the chief executive officer of Restaurant Associates, which operates both the Wright, the new restaurant at the Guggenheim, and a cafe that opened in May off the American wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Our company has been doing this since the 1960s, and the tendency is definitely away from the quick serve of the old days and toward fine dining.”
A variety of factors seems to be behind the shift. One is simple economics: with the Great Recession now in its second year and donations from corporations and wealthy board members becoming harder to obtain, museums, especially those that committed to ambitious expansion plans before the downturn, are eager to tap into new sources of income.
“We built a new museum, just to open during the crisis,” said Holly Hotchner, director of the Museum of Arts and Design, which moved into the renovated 2 Columbus Circle in the fall of 2008. “When we conceived of doubling our budget, earned income became really important, and that was even before the recession. We had to find another $5 million, and our donors are stretched to give what they give. So creative revenue sources, new ways to find income, have become very important.”
But museum officials also talk about “enhancing the museum experience” so as not to lose ground to other forms of entertainment. Visitors are both more discerning and demanding than they used to be, and many want, or even expect, a memorable meal to round off their day. And they don’t want to have to leave the building to find it.
“Given that people spend so much time here, having a dining experience comparable to the facility itself, whether formal or more casual, was important to us,” said James Gara, the chief operating officer of the Museum of Modern Art, which has offered three eating establishments in its building since 2004, when it completed its renovation. “To have just a concessionaire wasn’t up to the standards of what we were aiming for. We wanted to offer our membership and visitors something on a level with the rest of the museum.”
For restaurateurs the benefits are even more obvious. For one thing, the typical contract to operate a restaurant in a museum is accompanied by exclusive catering rights at museum events. That can be quite lucrative in its own right and also introduces the food provider to trustees, donors and other wealthy people who might want to use the caterer’s services at parties and receptions.
Then there is the lure of what amounts to a very large captive audience: MoMA, for example, attracts more than 2.7 million visitors each year. Then there is the prestige factor that comes with being associated with a major arts institution.
“A museum is an exciting facility, with high standards and benchmarks, and it gives a company a very high profile and visibility,” said Mr. Cattani, whose company operates all the food establishments at the Met, including its afternoon tea. “If you can succeed in that environment, that offers you entree to other opportunities. And museums are here to stay, so contracts are typically long term, and that brings some stability in your business.”
But installing and running a restaurant in a museum requires a balancing act on both sides. For starters there are logistical questions, like where to put a kitchen so that visitors can’t smell cooking odors and so that the artwork is in no way affected.
“This was a totally foreign area for me, and there were all these things that no one else here had any background in,” said Ms. Hotchner of the Museum of Arts and Design, whose new restaurant, Robert, is operated by the restaurateur Michael Weinstein’s Ark group. “I knew nothing about restaurant law. And dealing with a grease trap from the ninth floor to the basement?”
Beyond that, there are the larger aesthetic issues central to a museum’s mission and image. For the restaurant operator the principal challenge is to blend in and not overwhelm a museum’s distinctive look and style with a design that clashes or contradicts.
“We’re in a Breuer building that is a great piece of architecture, so we have to have to respect the quality and distinctiveness of that,” said Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney, where the new cafe is now being designed. “Whatever we do can’t fight against that, but it can’t totally acquiesce to it either, because we’re not looking for a period piece. It’s a fine balance between being deferential, but not slavish.”
The 50s decade was known for many things: post-war affluence and increased choice of leisure time activities, conformity, the Korean War, middle-class values, the rise of modern jazz, the rise of 'fast food' restaurants and drive-ins (Jack in the Box - founded in 1951; McDonalds - first franchised in 1955 in Des Plaines, IL; and A&W Root Beer Company - formed in 1950, although it had already established over 450 drive-ins throughout the country), a baby boom, the all-electric home as the ideal, white racist terrorism in the South, the advent of television and TV dinners, abstract art, the first credit card (Diners Club, in 1951), the rise of drive-in theaters to a peak number in the late 50s with over 4,000 outdoor screens (where young teenaged couples could find privacy in their hot-rods), and a youth reaction to middle-aged cinema. Older viewers were prone to stay at home and watch television (about 10.5 million US homes had a TV set in 1950). 
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