Check, Please! (Cont.)

Despite the cafe’s amenities, Chef Maloney says that working in a museum has been an adjustment. Whereas the hours are much shorter, she says she has had to get used to working around the museum’s agenda. “It took a while to get on the same page as each other,” she says. Part of reaching an understanding was trusting in the restaurant staff’s expertise. “Why it works so well is because our team at the cafe are all high-end restaurant people,” says Maloney. The rest of the museum staff “wouldn’t know how to run it. We have total creative freedom and full support.”

However, similar situations don’t always work out. A respondent to Williams’s survey cautioned other museums about managing their own restaurants: “[We] tried to open a restaurant initially with staff we hired, purchasing our own food and preparing it in an ill-equipped kitchen. Bad choice! Museums considering entering the restaurant business should be advised to think it through thoroughly and proceed cautiously—food and beverage is a tough industry.”

James Gara knows that all too well. “We’ve tried every version of restaurants. We’re probably the pioneer of restaurants,” says Gara, MoMA’s chief operating officer. “We’ve run restaurants ourselves. We had people with shopping carts at Fairway [supermarket] when suppliers didn’t come through. After years of buying poultry and escarole, we went with a management company.”

MoMA is not alone. The 2003 Museum Financial Information, the most recent information available, reports that 68 percent of museums contract out foodservice.

The relationship between MoMA and the Modern is ruled by a license agreement, where the museum gets a base fee and then a percentage above a threshold. Despite the hefty funds the restaurant provides, Gara says, “We don’t look at it as a revenue source. We look at it as an amenity to our members and visitors. When you look at a restaurant, [you have to ask] is it to make a lot of money or is it an amenity? I’m always looking for new sources of revenue, but our primary concern is experience.”

Café Sebastienne also provides a revenue stream for the Kemper, particularly through the special events it caters. “The money goes back into the mission of the museum,” Cozad explains. And the restaurant furthers the museum’s educational mission by displaying 115 paintings from the collection, offering music and dance performances and hosting cooking classes.

Despite the peace, love and harmony, the Kemper’s focus is clear. “The museum always comes first. The collection, the exhibitions and the programs are central,” says Cozad. “[The restaurant] is an amenity. It’s under the umbrella of the museum. It’s not operating in its own realm.”

Mike Devine of Malrite says that while Zola extends the museum experience for visitors, perhaps most importantly the restaurant ensured that the Spy Museum wouldn’t be solely a tourist destination. “It provided us with a different way to attract a different audience,” says Devine. “In D.C. we expected the museum to draw tourists. We also knew that without local support, we wouldn’t be able to thrive the way we wanted to.”

Also to Zola’s advantage is its prime downtown location, a neighborhood that has become increasingly vibrant since the restaurant opened in 2002. Capitalizing on that momentum is what Malrite had in mind. “We thought the revenue stream would be opportunistic,” says Devine.

The Modern’s David Swinghamer understands the power of place. He calls the Modern “a restaurant that has one of the world’s best locations,” which is closer to fact than hyperbole: It made Restaurants and Institutions magazine’s top 100 independent restaurants in 2007. The Modern sits at No. 91 with $11 million in food and beverage sales and 300,000 meals served in 2006. Others on the list include New York’s Tavern on the Green and Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami.

Whereas the Modern’s location has been an asset, Palettes’ has proved challenging. Kevin Taylor, who owns five other restaurants and two catering businesses, says that before the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building opened last year, Palettes would be relatively dormant between temporary exhibitions. “It would take months to rebuild an exhibition,” he says.

And even after the opening, the flow of patrons has not been as steady as expected. “The Denver Art Museum expected the Bilbao effect,” says Taylor. “In the first year they expected the architecture to carry the museum and that there would be a tremendous amount of traffic.” Taylor adds that traffic was also hampered by a winter with back-to-back snowstorms. The cumulative effect is that the restaurant is 15 percent below projections for the year following the new building’s opening. He says he expects Palettes to fill in October when a series of exhibitions opens.

Palettes’ particular challenges are a lack of evening foot traffic and that the neighborhood is not a destination, Taylor says, even for potato-crusted diver scallops with a caper-raisin reduction or salmon with bacon mashed potatoes and a béarnaise sauce. “We’re surrounded by Civic Center Park with lots of homeless people and parking lots.”

Despite the issues with traffic, Taylor does not regret his nine-year partnership with the museum. If nothing else, Palettes has served to build his brand and drive visitors to his other restaurants. “That donor, that customer, that board member has been in the community for a very long time,” he says. “They eat in all our restaurants.”

Strengthening local ties through its chef is something DAM felt strongly about. The museum was courted by big national foodservice companies but decided to stay with Taylor. Manask says he sees the same thinking with many of his clients. “The thought is that maybe there’s more cachet to a local celebrity than a national chef,” says Manask.

Sodexho, which runs foodservice for 25 museums and cultural institutions nationwide and has been doing so for more than 20 years, has been partnering with celebrity chefs and remaining competitive with Wolfgang Puck, which operates 10 museum restaurants. The Cincinnati Museum Center, with the help of Sodexho, has partnered with local celebrity chef Jean-Robert de Cavel, known in Cincinnati for turning Pigall’s back into a gastronomic jewel. “The client needed a partner that could not only provide high quality foodservice for their retail operations, but one who could also support their initiative to grow special events and become ‘the’ destination spot and caterer of choice for the greater Cincinnati area,” according to an internal Sodexho memorandum.

It can come down to keeping up with the Joneses or even staying in the race. For instance, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, recently opened a new $37 million building, complete with a Wolfgang Puck eatery with salads, homemade soups, grilled panini and desserts created by Puck’s pastry chef from Spago, Sherry Yard. The goal is to attract more visitors in a city where most museums are dwarfed by the Museum of Fine Arts. “There is a tremendous amount of peer pressure,” says Manask. “What I continually hear is concern with what their peers and counterparts are doing. They all want a brand that is synonymous with who they are—where they can make a statement and be the hot ticket in town.”

Despite the success that some museums have had, Manask does not see a bright future for the destination restaurant. “They’re really the anomaly,” says Manask. “I think you’ll see more branding where museums reach out to local regional and national restaurant operators to bring cachet, brand, recognition and earned income to their institution.”

Manask says museums need the right combination of factors to have a successful destination restaurant. “You need the traffic, visibility and access. How many can do that? Not that many.”

Coen agrees, but adds that it also comes down to available audience. “The higher you go, the wider appeal you need,” he says. “If your average check is $8, everybody in the neighborhood is going to come to you. If you’re at $100, you’re a destination attraction, but you have to attract from miles around.”

With the success and proliferation of these restaurants, museums might be tacitly accepting that all functions need not be mission-driven. Which brings us back to Adam Freed, who would rather go to the Modern than MoMA. When asked about this scenario, MoMA’s James Gara says patrons like Freed represent the minority. Even if all Modern-goers never stepped foot in a gallery, Gara says it’s still a trip to the museum. “Even if you’re going for a dining experience, you’re still looking at the [sculpture] garden.” In the end both the restaurant-goer and the museum staff get what they want: a great experience within the institution’s walls.