The Modern

Bentel & Bentel set the restaurant across the seam where MoMA's 1939 Goodwin and Stone building meets Philip Johnson's 1964 addition and Yoshio Taniguchi's 2004 one, running curved walls of lit glass through the plan to bind the three together and to hold the formal dining room apart from the Bar Room beside it. A Thomas Demand photograph hangs in the Bar Room, a forest the artist built out of cut paper before shooting it. The garden outside is the real one.

Thomas Allan came in as chef de cuisine in 2014, after moving to Paris in 2012 to work as sous chef to Yannick Alléno at Le Meurice, and has run the kitchen since February 2020. Dinner is a choice of two tasting menus, Impressions at 175 dollars and the longer Abstractions at 275, and because the lists change often, a recent Abstractions ran from tuna with radish and shiso through to peaches and cream, by way of a brown butter Parker House roll and its cultured butter and a course listed as eggs on eggs on eggs. Lunch keeps a three-course prix fixe at 115 alongside an eight-course tasting.

The wine list runs to 3,000 selections and has carried a Wine Spectator Grand Award since 2016, which sits with four James Beard Awards, one of them for wine service. Four seats at the Kitchen Table sit inside the kitchen itself, on an enhanced tasting menu at 345 a head. The Bar Room next door opens its marble bar at 11:30 and stays à la carte, crispy fried chicken with honey among the snacks. Both rooms take walk-ins.