SHARE:
Dining & Spirits
Guide: Art Museum Restaurants in Florida
Palette, Meet Palate
 Chef Michael Coyne and general manager George Armstrong preside over Treviso at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. |
Looking out at the St. Petersburg yacht harbor, the cafe at Museum of Fine Arts is among a growing number of museums that are serving up art on the plate as well as on the walls. Palate meets palette when guests sit down to a pyramid of tempura shrimp on a lo mein salad, bacon-wrapped radicchio or a salad of duck, frisee greens and walnuts.
The Museum of Fine Arts had no public dining at all, so the creation of a smart cafe run by Olympia Catering of Tampa was especially welcome. Chef Lisa Schwartz Green serves lunch five days a week, brunch on Sundays and hosts a monthly jazz night, with a menu that goes casually upscale to $14. Green, who styles herself cafe curator, favors fruit strudels and fresh soups and keeps even French fries in fashion, frite to a crisp, dribbled with a rustic bleu and dashed with fleur de sel. Wines run from vinho verde to Chateauneuf-du-Pape.
The cafe’s vast space, three-story glass windows and terrace of tables make it "one of the best locations for a downtown restaurant," says Beth Fields, the museum’s special events coordinator — and a perfect site for social events, a major income source for any grand public building.
Once confined to converted cloak rooms and basement break rooms, museum food concessions have moved up in prominence, space and cuisine. The museums get an extended salon where visitors and donors can linger, while restaurants and caterers get drop-dead settings and a captive audience with top-shelf demographics.
The biggest so far could be Treviso in Sarasota, serving the Ringling Museum and Asolo Repertory Theatre; in season, the lunch crowd numbers 500 a day and doesn’t thin out until after 3 p.m. When the Ringling built a new visitors pavilion, it installed a massive kitchen and turned to food service giant Guest Services. Chef Michael Coyne runs a modern Italian menu from bruschetta and panzanella to veal Milanese. He just revamped the outdoor Banyan Cafe with fresh-made sandwiches and popcorn shrimp.
In south Florida, the savvy culinary brothers Lyon and Lyon from the Design District feed two museums. The Dynamo in the gift shop at the Wolfsonian has an artisanal Bohemian coffee house menu; in the Palm Beach colonnades of the Norton, chefs pair more fanciful dishes to the art of each exhibition. This spring’s red lentil and red pepper soup is credited to Georgia O’Keeffe’s "Red and Pink Rocks," lemongrass wonton soup with crescent-shaped dumplings to a contemporary Chinese photograph.
Food’s looking up in other cultural venues, too. At the new Tampa Bay History Center, the lobby is dominated by the blue tile, wrought iron and ornate wooden bar of the Columbia Cafe, a branch of the century-old Ybor City restaurant.
 Fried avocado with red pepper coulis at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. |
Business Beat - Week of May 10th
