FOOD Feeds the Artist in Us All

The original FOOD opened in 1971. One of the first restaurants in SoHo, its founders — artists Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard and Gordon Matta-Clark — sought to do more than just serve meals, but satiate the city’s creative scene, calling on artists to put on elaborate, stagey dinners that fused culinary craft and performance.

For a modest price, customers could sample creations by Donald Judd, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. Other famed fares included a wearable, $4 USD necklace of leftover bones, and “Alive,” a bowl of live brine shrimp swimming in egg whites. In an unrealized act, sculptor Mark di Suvero famously wanted to use a crane to serve food through the windows, a meal complete with screwdrivers and hammers as utensils.

Half a century after shuttering doors, news broke last year that FOOD was making a comeback, courtesy of artist Lucien Smith. Under the weight of its legacy and the heavy hearsay of art world celebrity, skeptics were quick to question: How would Smith revive the legendary 1970’s artist haunt, a place that seemed to exist more concretely in urban myth than in flesh and blood? How would it play to a 2025 flavor?

By September, the highly anticipated FOOD had thrown open its doors. Smith, with the help of Parisian chef Mathieu Canet and Matta-Clark’s estate, were ready to welcome the eatery’s next generation of culinary creatives. The new spot, a narrow space snuggly situated on the corner of Canal and Eldridge in Chinatown, keeps much of the original’s essence, while reinventing a healthy amount, ensuring that the new establishment is both legible and relevant to today’s diners.

At 89 Canal, Smith’s FOOD plays to a downtown cool: colorful, sculptural stools by Max Lamb lines the bar that cuts down the center. Devin Turnbull speakers quietly hang overhead, while works by locals and legends — On Kawara, Rachel Simon and Smith — dot the walls.

The interiors, stylish and friendly, still embodies the cultural touchpoints of its bohemian past while positing its own ethos for this new chapter: to marry ambition and openness in the name of soulful, simple, straight-up, good food; a promise to choose honesty over the haute. FOOD doesn’t consider itself to be fine dining, nor is it trying to test gastronomical limits.

Even as the new establishment tilts away from high, theatrical concept and towards restraint, the food itself remains as the artistic constant — an immersive medium (arguably the most) that transforms you through the very act of consumption.

“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. Just simply good food,” explained chef Zikomo “Z” McBurnie, “that’s all I ever cared about.” The new FOOD leaves the old’s avant-garde ego at the door, and figures out a way to bring it back down to Earth.

As before, it’s a place to eat and then some — a venue, social hub and living art piece defined by those who work and dine there. Though, to my surprise, most of FOOD’s staff wouldn’t consider themselves fine artists, at least the traditional sense, save for a few, like poet London Stewart, who works front of house, and illustrator-dishwasher James Fisher Smith.

While there’s no sight of any bone necklaces, or jumping shrimp, no cranes swinging through the windows, FOOD is still far from your average restaurant. The menu rotates daily, with three to five new dishes per meal. No two days are ever the same, and it’s up to the staff – a tight team of 8 — to decide what gets served up each night.

A night at FOOD could bring you a ribeye steak or Full English fried rice; curry goat or a scarily accurate Kid Cuisine remake, cheffed in house. Comtè polenta with burnt cream and wild Floridian snapper could also be up for grabs. There’s plenty of play, discovery and risk baked into the format. It’s all part of the fun.

In line with the SoHo original, FOOD has started to welcome guests chefs, starting with Rirkrit Tiravanjia, who led pad Thai night in October, with more in the works. Smith helmed the restaurant’s opening dinner with Irma Thomas’ famous red beans and rice with cornbread. Yet even as the owner, he’s almost entirely taken a backseat role to leave the cooking to the professionals.

“I don’t want to be that person that comes in here and tells people what to do,” Smith told me over a bowl of Chinese chicken salad, a new lunch staple. “These guys come up with the menu, and preserving that freedom is really important. It’s important that the staff feel like they’re the real centerpiece of the restaurant because without them, there’s no operation.”

The menu is ambitious, but the guidelines are plain and simple: “we’re tapping into the neighborhood and putting on stuff we want to eat,” explains Pea Aldea. When he’s not cooking in the kitchen, he’s biking around the city filling a backpack with day-of ingredient needs. Little grocery stores on Mott are great local pick-ups, he shared. Meat comes from Pino’s in the West Village and produce from Campo Rosso, a Union Square Greenmarket mainstay. The network of shops exist as a flight of Chinatown’s flavors, though the meals are where it gets personal.

For this week’s menu, Luke Vu — the “juggernaut” behind weekly meal planning, as his co-chefs call him — channels his time studying abroad in Berlin: currywurst, a döner box and beef panang curry, a comforting, if non-German, dish he often enjoyed during his stay. Behind him, tomatillo quarters get fleshy and fragrant on the grill. They’re prepping for dinner — chilaquiles — inspired by a separate trip to La Catedral in Chicago.

The idea came to him while scrolling through photos late at night, moved, reminiscing on tender times. “It’s not an easy time for people right now,” Vu expressed. “If our food can invoke a good memory, that’s all I could really ask for.”

Shifting from places to people, the same can be said for McBurnie, who, through each of the restaurant’s curry dishes, attempts to chef “something as good” as the curry tuna he grew up with. “Deep down, every cook wants to recreate the dishes their mom used to make”

As Aldea tells me, there’s a “childishness” to FOOD. “What we do here is pretty approachable. It’s accessible which makes it relatable for people. Nothing too avant-guard.” There’s a curiosity to all of the meals here; a way to seize nostalgia and make it land softly on the palate. It’s not about rejecting refinement, but rather returning to a time where even imperfect food could inspire excitement, without the tireless churn for elevation.

For all the talk of nostalgia, or the cultural cache that is FOOD, while it’s all nice and good, the food is still the main event. Succulent pork and chive dumplings doused in chili crisp and soy. Fresh radicchio piled high in ethereal hues. An easy, delicious meatball sub, thick with Monte’s sauce. Even the original, which closed after just three years, is remembered as a disruptor in experimental arts, but dining culture at large, introducing seasonality, sushi and sashimi, the advent of the open kitchen layout to American eateries.

In the time since opening, the sub-20 seat space has shaped up to be a comfy hangout for cultural kingpins — artists, musicians, directors, writers, and chefs sitting beside one another to enjoy a cozy meal. “It’s a very vulnerable restaurant,” said Vu. “It’s cool because people can feel that and are a lot more willing to hang out and allow themselves to just be.”

With everything in plain view and many of its diners eating the same dishes at the same time, the space brings us back to the family dining table, championing that easy sense of camaraderie or community, that Smith had envisioned for Serving the People (STP), the artist nonprofit platform, that the restaurant was built on.

Four months and roughly 400 dishes in, FOOD is settling into itself quite nicely. Smith, busy with STP’s new Slam Jam partnership and the venue’s weekday concert program, is already thinking about FOOD’s elsewhere, though catches himself before he, in his words, “bites off more than he can chew.”

In a culture insatiably hungry for the next, new thing, FOOD offers a much-needed slow down, a return to the magical act of good food. Artwork or not, the kitchen staff tells me, is beside the point, because what makes the restaurant special isn’t just a label, a scene, a dish, or even its bygone days, but the humanity that its team can bring to the table.