I have seen heaven, and it is at Westmoreland—cocktails, comfort food, and yes, art.
There’s an Alex Katz line that I always think of when I encounter a disappointing but—I try to remind myself—potentially edifying exhibition: “If we only wanted to look at masterpieces, we’d spend all our time at the Frick.” It keeps me going. Of course, as nice as it would be to spend all one’s time at the Frick, there has always been one serious logistical issue: One has to eat, and the Frick has never had a restaurant.
Until now.
Fresh off unveiling its handsome $220 million renovation back in April, the Frick opened its new restaurant to the public on Friday. It is called Westmoreland—named for the private train car used by museum founder Henry Clay Frick to travel the country (not the U.S. general in Vietnam)—and it is glorious.
With 50 seats on the museum’s newly opened second floor, Westmoreland is about the size of Ron Perelman’s place nearby on the Upper East Side, Fleming, and it is similarly plush, casually luxurious but not quite cozy. (It is also much smaller than Frick’s railway car, as the Times notes.) There are red bamboo chairs, a wall of smoky mirrors, windows with views of the Russell Page–designed garden down below, and an elegant wooden bar with four deep-purple leather seats. (The interiors are by Bryan O’Sullivan Studio.)
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Darren Waterston has painted a spectral, deserted mountainous landscape around the upper part of the dining room that may bring to mind the colors of Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80), which the artist has mentioned as an inspiration, and the nuanced spareness of East Asian ink painting. It is unobtrusive, but it sneaks up on you. Waterson also designed bas-relief ceiling medallions that suggest blowing leaves or, from a distance, ripples in water—life on the move—and he has painted Westmoreland’s foyer in deep, dark, bewitching greens, a quite sexy place to wait for a table.
