Art, Basil

Manuela is a farm-to-table gallery for hungry collectors.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

STARVING-ARTIST CLICHÉS aside, most of the artists I know love to eat. Hard to swing an art handler at Lucien or the Odeon without knocking over at least one or two others. Many of them even love to cook, and since the dawn of the gallery scene, a number of them have used the restaurant as their canvas, from FOOD, where the avantgarde architect Gordon MattaClark used to dish out frogs' legs in the '70s, through Rirkrit Tiravanija's '90s restaurants-as-happenings, curry cooked out of 303 Gallery for all and sundry. (Tiravanija and his erstwhile gallerist Gavin Brown followed them up with the small restaurant Unclebrother upstate, and Lucien Smith-not the same Lucien as the restaurant-is planning to revive FOOD in Chinatown sometime soon.)

Manuela, which opened in October, is stuffed with art that climbs up the walls, Royal Academy style, and often with artists. My first night there, I clocked the great colorist Stanley Whitney a few tables away; another night, Cindy Sherman dined with former Harper's Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey. But Manuela is not an artist's restaurant. It's a rarer thing: a collector's restaurant. Though it has had, in its first months, the zippy energy of a roomscanning, air-kissing opening, its pitch feels directed less toward celebrating its makers than cosseting its clientele.