NEW YORK — The grande dame of Manhattan museums has decided to import a dash of downtown cool.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a contract with the chef Ignacio Mattos and the restaurateur Thomas Carter, the men behind Estela on East Houston Street, to create an Upper East Side version of the restaurant at the Met Breuer, a new stand-alone outpost of the museum that will be devoted to 20th- and 21st-century work.
The Met Breuer is set to open in March, but the restaurant, which may be called Estela Breuer (the name is still not finalized), could open early in the summer.
“It seems very attractive to bring that downtown energy uptown,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Met is all too often seen as this sedate, august institution.”
Estela’s approach to food and service is seen as emblematic of a downtown sensibility; there is nothing quite like Estela in the neighborhood surrounding the Met.
Campbell said he liked the “experiential” style of a meal at Estela, where the impromptu nature of the menu invites both snacking and feasting. “It can be formal, but it can be very informal,” he said. “It’s very much what you as the diner make of it.”
The building that the Estela team will be working in, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street, used to house the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has moved south to the meatpacking district.
Museum cafeterias were once drab way stations that served uninspired fare, but museum directors in New York and around the country have gradually realized that food offered by name-brand chefs is a crucial way to attract more visitors.
Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group oversees the restaurants at a couple of major museums in New York: the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art and Untitled at the Whitney. In downtown Los Angeles, the chef Timothy Hollingsworth and the restaurateur Bill Chait recently opened Otium, a restaurant linked to the Broad, a contemporary art museum. And Stephen Starr, the restaurateur behind spots like Upland and El Vez, brought Caffè Storico, an Italian restaurant, to the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side.
But restaurateurs like Meyer, Starr and Chait are safe bets compared with Mattos and Carter, who have never taken on a project of this magnitude.
Mattos seemed almost taken aback that he had “an opportunity to partner up with the biggest museum in the Western Hemisphere,” as he put it. He added, “I love going to the Metropolitan with my son.”
Another New York museum that has chosen a smaller, more independent culinary collaborator is MoMA PS1 in Queens, where the in-house restaurant is M. Wells Dinette.
The Metropolitan Museum “wanted something that was a little more individual and very particular to New York,” Carter said, adding that its leaders had not expressed an interest in opening an old-school, white-tablecloth restaurant. “They want something more convivial and rustic and fun,” he said.
Carter is the restaurant’s resident wine expert, and the wine list at the Breuer branch of Estela will be much larger than the one on Houston Street: about 500 bottles uptown versus about 200 downtown. “It will dwarf this one, but it will still be manageable,” he said. The new restaurant will have its own entrance and hours.
The Estela crew is also in the midst of preparing to open Cafe Altro Paradiso, an Italian restaurant in SoHo.
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