Lately, supper clubs like Montreal’s Menu Extra and Paris’s We Are ONA have been giving the restaurant industry a run for its money, creating pop-up dining environments that double as high-concept art installations. Given this level of competition, perhaps the only hope for a culinary destination looking to deliver an even greater degree of creative flair was to partner with an actual art institution. Enter Oberon, the New Museum’s ground-floor restaurant that feels like a natural extension of one of the avant-garde gallery’s exhibitions.
That cohesive flow is in part credit to OMA, the architecture firm that designed both Oberon and the angular 5,574-square-metre New Museum addition that it sits within. By day, when it functions as a café and lunch spot, Oberon can be accessed directly through the museum’s atrium — but by night, it shifts into a 120-seat restaurant and cocktail bar reached via a separate back entrance down a graffiti-clad alleyway. With both day and night clienteles in mind, Oberon reflects the artistic spirit of its museum setting yet also feels like its own distinct entity. In particular, where the rest of the New Museum’s OMA-designed wing skews industrial — complete with a staircase lined in metal mesh — Oberon feels earthy and organic.
Viewed from the museum’s ground-floor atrium, the freestanding box that contains the restaurant may initially seem to be built of more metal, but upon closer inspection it reveals itself to instead be wrapped in silver leaf-treated cork. Opaque windows wrap around the cube, offering a partially obscured, intriguing view of the leafy planters that sit along the edge of the cavernous space on the other side.
These hits of nature are in keeping with Oberon’s menu, a plant-focused presentation of ingredients sourced locally in the Hudson Valley. The restaurant is the latest venture from the Oberon Group, a hospitality company that prides itself on running carbon-negative operations. Inspired by Oberon’s zero-waste ambitions, OMA expresses a strong sustainability ethos through the restaurant’s material palette, too.
Sure enough, biodegradable, carbon-absorbing cork produced by Portuguese manufacturer Sofalca wraps the entire interior, bolstering acoustic performance while providing a natural sense of warmth. Along with the large domed cork ceiling at the centre of the dining room, smaller CNC-milled cork domes (again finished with silver leaf) hang above each of the perimeter booths, also fabricated in cork.
Beyond this bold material gesture are a series of artist collaborations. New York-based Korean furniture designer Minjae Kim contributed the restaurant’s hand-sculpted ash dining tables and bar top and resin-dipped fibreglass light fixtures, which both celebrate the texture of hand craft; he describes them as pieces that are “intentionally imperfect and avoid being pristine.”
Meanwhile, Shrine Oberon, a video piece by New York-based artist Ian Cheng, provides a dramatic backdrop to the bar. One of Cheng’s “simulations” — a series of works that he has described as “video games that play themselves” — the artwork uses agentic A.I. to create an ever-evolving, atmospheric animation featuring characters traversing a trippy, otherworldly landscape. Beyond the video’s entertainment value, it also serves as a key source of light for the bar. To cap off the artistic program, at the end of each meal, guests receive a chocolate created by artist and musician Laurie Anderson. At Oberon, you can have your art and eat it, too.
The New Museum’s Oberon Restaurant Proves There’s An Art to Sustainable Dining
Cork serves as the main ingredient in a mystical grotto tucked within OMA’s addition to the edgy NYC art institution.