Modern Art And Vegetarian Dishes Make Good Partners

The Studio Café at the New Whitney Museum Is the Perfect Spot for a Quick Bite with Lots of Flavor By Rosemarie T. Anner Not that I expected much. After all this was just a café but when my friend Barbara said she needed something to eat, I agreed to try the Studio Café at the new Whitney Museum. The line of people waiting to buy tickets to the museum that Friday of Memorial Day weekend extended to the end of the block and the line of people waiting for a table was no better in the café. We had taken the first off-peak Metro-North into the city from Greenwich. Our Whitney tickets, which we had purchased online the night before, indicated we were admissible at 11 a.m. but no later than 11:30 a.m. We barely made it. Seventh Avenue was a jumble of taxis, buses, pedestrians, construction sites and delivery trucks. Our frustrated taxi driver pulled curbside and said, "There's the subway. Take it to the museum. I'm losing money." Nice guy. Barbara shot back with a quick repartee: "And it's costing us money. Get over to Ninth and drive us there." While I'm not so sure about Renzo Piano's gray structure that jutted jaggedly out of the meatpacking streetscape into the Manhattan skyline, what was inside the building were American treasures, many familiar and just as many new to me. For two hours Barbara and I perambulated through the seventh-and-eighth-floor light-filled galleries and now paused in the corridor connecting the kitchen to the Studio Café dining room on the eighth floor. We watched as bowls of aromatic soups and colorful salads, and plates of artistically constructed open-face sandwiches were hustled to tables. There was an air of conviviality and palpable excitement in the café as if everyone couldn't wait to compare notes on what thrilled them the most in the galleries. All we really needed, we kept saying to one another, was a bite, a tapa-something or other, but when the very efficient young woman at the maitre d's station announced, "Table for two outside ready for you," we were suddenly very hungry. The outdoor decor is finely tuned to Piano's gray palette with undertones of white and black incursions. Our gray metal table, with its black woven place mats and white napkins — cloth, I must point out — was under a gray umbrella near the fire escape of a stairway to the upper viewing terrace. At every table there was animated conversation but the sky and the harbor swallowed the sounds so that Barbara and I felt comfortable during our own chit-chat. An occasional breeze brought a welcome respite from the hot white sun and muggy heat of that afternoon. Barbara ordered a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich from a menu favoring the vegetarians among the museum-goers. A plethora of farmer's market produce hogged the menu. I am not a vegetarian but I was intrigued. In our neck of the woods in the suburbs, we had not encountered so many vegetarian choices on menus in the local restaurants and it's always a struggle for my vegan daughter to find a dish she will "tolerate." She will love Studio Café. Out of eight offerings in the "Toast" category, five were vegetarian. Of three soups, two were vegetarian, and among the three salad selections only one had meat. There was sugar snap peas, asparagus, avocado, carrots, broccoli rabe, pickled cucumbers and peppers, radishes and mushrooms, and kale, but of course. Desserts featured strawberries, pecans, oranges, passion fruit and coconut. Either the chef owned a farm or he was vegetarian himself! To give you an idea of the sophistication of this farm-focused menu, let me tell you about the crostini (labeled sandwich on the menu) I ordered. First, the platform for all open-face sandwiches ($12) is a toasted, thick slice of earthy sour dough bread with a dark crust. You taste the tang of the dough but only slightly so. It's the topping communion of unexpected ingredients that exhilarate the palate. My toast had a layer of mashed yellow-eye beans, a lace of brilliant green broccoli rabe, and a crown of cubed, honey roasted carrots. A confetti of grated provolone and a shower of tiny yellow flowers from the broccoli rabe completed the composition. It was simplicity itself and packed with assertive character. Umani on every level. I had to dupe it at home. I bought sour dough bread from the Kneaded Bread in Port Chester, New York, and some good provolone at the Tarry Market, Joe Bastianich's outpost also in Port Chester and KB's neighbor on the opposite corner. I could not find yellow-eye beans so I bought two scoopfuls of loose very small black-eye beans — no name — from Whole Foods. I picked a few leaves of tooth-edged arugula from my garden to substitute for the broccoli rabe which is not my husband's favorite vegetable. I decided to shred the carrots because the café's cubes of carrots rolled off my bread. I wanted to taste every layer in one bite but the carrots were hard to control. Shredding them, I figured, would work better. I soaked the beans overnight and the next morning cooked them in water to cover and added garlic, a bay leaf and onion until cooked but not mushy. Then I shredded the carrots and sautéed them in a little olive oil, again incorporating aromatics. I added a tablespoon of honey while the carrots were still hot. I mashed the beans with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper and a bit of liquid from the cooking water. When they were the consistency of mashed potatoes, I spread them on a sliced, toasted slab of sour dough bread, put the arugula on top, shaving a bit of provolone overall, and crested it all with the carrots. My last flourish were tiny yellow flowers from some almost-gone-to-seed sour mustard greens growing near the arugula. Results? Pretty good. Lots of savory flavor on one piece of bread. Close enough to the sandwich I had at Studio Café to be a repeat serving for lunch or as an appetizer for guests. Of course, it did not pack the punch of the café's but it was a good imitation. At the Studio Café, I had a mango-lime drink ($6) but at home, a neat, crisp chilled Sauvignon Blanc was the choice on a warm summer evening. Oh, did I mention that a chef came out from the kitchen to talk to us? I guess we were asking too many questions of the waitress, who went back and forth between us and the kitchen during our Q and A. Dressed in white shirt and black pants, the chef, the sculptor of the bean-carrot medley, patiently listened to Barbara who said that something more was needed on her plate to add dimension to the grilled cheese sandwich and make it more visually appealing. We talked for twenty minutes — about the yellow-eye beans that he buys from a farmer in the Finger Lakes area, how he uses the herbs from his mother's garden in his cooking, the fact that he was writing a cookbook, about the local farmer's market. We even swapped kitchen stories and then he said he had to get back to work. We asked him his name. He said it was Michael Anthony.