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The art of eating

The food in cultural institutions is often utilitarian, but in venues such as the Sydney Opera House it should reflect their prestige, values and artistic aspirations.

David Prior

Sydney Opera House chief executive Louise Herron.
Sydney Opera House chief executive Louise Herron.Marco Del Grande

Viewed from the outside

The government of the day's decision to build the design was a creative risk that seems as visionary in 2014 as it did when Utzon won the commission in 1957. Famously, however, Utzon was never able to fully realise his vision for the building's interior, because of politics and bureaucracy. Whether it is adjusting its acoustics or more recently, and pointedly, its in-house restaurants, the Opera House has struggled to find perfect harmony.

In its pursuit of a food offering equal to the venue's prestige, values and artistic aspirations, in addition to balancing its responsibility to the public, the Opera House Trust now finds itself in difficult territory.

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However, the situation is familiar to some of the world's other great artistic institutions, many of which have been forced to contemplate the question: what is the role of food in a cultural institution?

Renowned for her food activism on many fronts, improving the food in public spaces is one of the chief missions of Alice Waters.

In the early years of her seminal Californian restaurant, Chez Panisse, Alice Waters vowed that she would never open another. She held true to that pledge, but only just. In 1998, the directors of the Louvre Museum in Paris invited Waters to open a restaurant there.

Utopian vision: Alice Waters planned to open a restaurant in the Louvre Museum in Paris, but hesitated when it came to signing.
Utopian vision: Alice Waters planned to open a restaurant in the Louvre Museum in Paris, but hesitated when it came to signing.Supplied

"When the offer came, I was excited about the possibilities of creating something right at the nexus of gastronomy and art."

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Waters travelled to Paris for a period, drawing up plans for a restaurant that would be "a platform, an exhibit, a conservatory, a laboratory and a vegetable garden in the Tuileries, connecting visitors to real, simple food".

When it came to signing on the dotted line, however, she hesitated. "I had a suspicion that in the end I would be among fast-food outlets so I never signed, although it almost broke my heart." Her intuition proved correct. Where there once might have been an Alice Waters-led food project at the Louvre, there is now a Starbucks.

Creative hub: Australian chef Skye Gyngell has opened Spring restaurant at Somerset House in London.
Creative hub: Australian chef Skye Gyngell has opened Spring restaurant at Somerset House in London.Neale Haynes

"I've never seen food as separate from culture, but rather vital to it," she says. "When we eat, we are engaging all our senses and it opens up the pathways to our mind and, when you are eating something good in a place of great beauty or culture, it forces you to think differently."

Since the Louvre project, Waters' interest in the transformative power of food in cultural institutions has grown rather than waned. When hosting an inauguration dinner for United States President Barack Obama in Washington, DC, she chose to serve the simple meal amid Rothko and Renoir paintings at The Phillips Collection museum of modern art rather than in a restaurant or function centre. In recent years, she has also advised and collaborated on numerous proposals for changing the food service in many of the most august art institutions in the US, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

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Although none of those projects has come to fruition in the way she envisioned them, the conversation has begun. Perhaps Waters' utopian vision and uncompromising style caused apprehension, but she points to a lack of foresight and willingness to take risks on behalf of administrators.

Visionary: Matt Moran has opened a branch of his Woollahra-based Chiswick restaurant in the Art Gallery of NSW.
Visionary: Matt Moran has opened a branch of his Woollahra-based Chiswick restaurant in the Art Gallery of NSW.Supplied

"Ultimately there is a disconnect between creative risks they want to take on stage or on their walls and what they are willing to do with food," she says. "Sadly, food is seen only as a way to make money and subsidise other areas. It should not be seen as cash cow or just a utility, but rather as a way celebrate and express the values of the place through food."

London-based cook Margot Henderson, agrees. "They [cultural institutions] start out wanting to please everyone, but in the end they please no one," says the partner of legendary St John restaurant chef Fergus Henderson. Traditionally, the food at the many galleries in central London has been terrible – "multinational food-service companies that also supply prisons, winning tenders and that kind of thing".

The influential Hendersons have long been the go-to restaurateurs and caterers of London's art set and share Waters' aspirations for food concessions in galleries, museums, theatres and libraries. Margot Henderson's Rochelle Canteen is located in an art school and she has catered for contemporary art fair Frieze London.

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Appealing places: Shannon Bennett has cafes at Melbourne's Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Appealing places: Shannon Bennett has cafes at Melbourne's Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Botanic Gardens.Craig Sillitoe

Few are aware that Fergus Henderson and his team at St John proposed taking over the restaurants at the National Gallery, London, and the National Portrait Gallery, but were declined because of of his signature eccentricity. When Margot Henderson was invited to provide the food at the Royal Academy, seen as straightforward Elizabeth David-inspired food – good, comforting English food that seemed right for that place and its heritage and right for London."

It might sound like words from the jilted, but the Fergusons have nothing to prove, only a desire to see good food as part of the institutions they admire. "I am really hopeful that the way we think about food culture is changing and, of course, I wouldn't say no to the Tate if they asked," she says, laughing.

Across the Thames from the Tate, Australian expatriate chef Skye Gyngell has recently opened her restaurant, Spring, at Somerset House. After leaving Petersham Nurseries in 2012, Gyngell searched for a space for a year. She briefly flirted with opening in the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens, but instead ended up at Somerset House, an imposing Georgian monolith that was once a palace, then a tax office and is now a thriving creative hub, home to the Courtauld Institute of Art and the British Fashion Council, among others.

Gyngell was chosen partially because of her commitment to the creative community that will grow around the restaurant. "I've always thought that the best ideas come from around the dining table so I hope that we can inspire a little of that," she says.

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In recent years, New York galleries, which arguably had the worst food of all, have begun to drastically improve. The pioneer was restaurateur Danny Meyer, who in 2006 opened The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a sleek and contemporary space where it is possible to eat while viewing works by Alexander Calder in the sculpture garden. At MoMA's little brother, PS1, M. Wells Dinette pays homage to the building's former identity as a schoolhouse with communal tables, a perpetually changing menu and a playground turned kitchen garden.

Opening next year in a space between the new Whitney Museum of American Art and the High Line, a public park built on a historic elevated rail line, will be the latest restaurant from the trio behind Torrisi Italian Specialities.

In Copenhagen, the city's extraordinary Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has not escaped New Nordic cuisine's embrace. The Louisiana Cafe serves an affordable cafeteria-style meal made from scratch. The bread for their its modern take on traditional smorrebrod is baked in house and all the ingredients are sourced locally.

Closer to home, we may be seeing the beginning of the end of friands from the fridge and toasted sandwiches assembled days earlier. At the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, chef Josue Lopez has curated a menu worthy of one of Australian's most innovative galleries.

In addition to his many other projects, Matt Moran has also opened a branch of his popular Woollahra-based Chiswick restaurant in the Art Gallery of NSW, with plans to work with the adjacent Royal Botanical Gardens to plant a teaching garden connected to the restaurant. At Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art, its main restaurant, The Source, offers contemporary French-inspired dishes.

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Melbourne has tried to use its public landmarks, but the success has been varied. My Mexican Cousin, a collaboration between Salvatore Malatesta and Maurice Esposito at the Recital Centre lasted only briefly. Shannon Bennett's spaces at the Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Botanic Gardens are appealing cafes, although they are not grand dining destinations.

Trocadero at Hamer Hall was a promising European restaurant that should have worked. That it didn't (owners the Van Haandel Group transformed it last November into a more relaxed Italian eatery) says less about the operation than it does of diners' willingness to embrace eating in a public space.

There are few restaurants anywhere that warrant the overused description "iconic". Bennelong at the Sydney Opera House is one that does. A miniature of the larger building, the restaurant space it is not only one of the prime viewing platforms of the concrete ribs, towering blades and slanted windows of Utzon's design, but also of Sydney itself. It is a restaurant space at the heart of Australian culture and a potential stage for the best of its food culture too, but it is also a room that has proven notoriously challenging both for the administrators responsible with overseeing it and the restaurateurs charged with breathing life into it.

The restaurant site in the World Heritage-listed building has been vacant since New Year's Day. In early 2013, the Sydney Opera House Trust announced a tender that aimed to change the purpose of space from a celebration of fine dining to something "more accessible and casual". The decision prompted Guillaume Brahimi, who had successfully operated his fine diner, Guillaume at Bennelong, in the space for 10 years, to withdraw from the tender process.

The winning bid eventually came from the Van Haandel Group, owner of the Stokehouse in Melbourne and Brisbane, which proposed a venue serving three meals a day, seven days a week, a kind of hybrid between a cafe and bistro. When, soon after the group won the bid, the Stokehouse in St Kilda was razed by fire, those plans fell apart and the Sydney Opera House Trust and its chief executive, Louise Herron, were forced to reconsider their plans, bringing in chefs Neil Perry and Christine Manfield as consultants. The tender was reissued, this time calling for a restaurant applicant that "embraces Australia's distinctive and diverse produce and culinary heritage".

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Herron, who does not plan to announce a new operator for Bennelong until "the first half of 2015", says food has become increasingly central to Australia's culture and lifestyle since the Sydney Opera House opened. "This place was built to embody our cultural aspirations as a young nation, and food is now a vital part of who we are."

As one of the busiest performing arts centres in the world and Australia's main tourist attraction, Herron wants the Opera House food and beverage venues to "meet the needs of a wide range of customers, from tourists and the after-work crowd to theatregoers and our resident performing arts companies".

Many remember vividly the brief period between 1995 and 1998 when restaurateur and fierce food intellect Gay Bilson ran Bennelong with chef Janni Kyritsis.

"We were young and it was the best meal Fergus and I had ever had," says Margot Henderson emphatically. "It made such an impression on me. It was so incredibly sophisticated and really showed me that Australia was on top of the food world at the time."

Theatre director Peter Sellars, who has staged productions in the Opera House, says of that time, "It was not just a message about food, but Gay's restaurant was a distilled series of poetic, sensual experiences that placed the diner in geographic, historical and aesthetic harmony with their surroundings and the extraordinary life choices that being Australian could imply."

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Bilson does not remember the time so fondly, having been "defeated by Bennelong". She has written: "In many ways. the most frustrating impediment to the success of the Bennelong space or, for that matter, any fine dining room in a significant public precinct, is that the Sydney Opera House is seen to be and, indeed, is owned by the taxpayers. Being 'ours', it is considered obliged to please everyone . . . and dining rooms are expected to do the impossible and satisfy all tastes, all purses."

Almost 20 years on, the same obstacle remains, but Waters remains optimistic. "The Sydney Opera House is such a symbol of the energy and hopefulness of Australia and everyone who visits there should be able to experience it through every sense, including taste."

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