Yes, Chef, curated by Zoe Lukov, and its affiliated restaurant concept, Black Caesar, are open at Water Street Projects through December 15.
“Is the decolonial dinner Friday or Saturday?” I overhear, passing Claes Oldenburg’s dolphin-sized corkscrew in the freshly minted exhibition space of what, per the New York Times, “might be the first ‘it’ building.” This is WSA (Water Street Associates), the midsize 1983 Fox & Fowle–designed skyscraper and former AIG headquarters, whose Instagram now boasts proof of visits from numerous Knowleses. Emily Ratajkowski recently hosted her “Après-Met” party here—a “flamboyant affair,” according to Vogue, where guests in “free-spirited and spectacularly slinky” outfits “sent air kisses across the mirrored dance floor.” Newly restored to cocaine-boom splendor by tax-haven trendsetter Gabriella Khalil, this wonderland of postmodern décor and hypnotic contradictions offers a moribund office culture one mountainous bump: making workspace into a scene. Maybe EmRata has your stapler.
According to the project’s Manhattan Commercial Revitalization application (for which it ultimately received a $41.3 million tax break), WSA treats “landlord as incubator.” Owned by a nebulous cast of characters including Gabriella’s husband, Matthew Khalil, pharmaceutical scion Carlo Bellini, Bushwack Capital’s Dawson Stellberger—and with unclear and contradictorily reported potential ties to sovereign debt Dracula Ken Dart—WSA is occupied by landlord-curated creatives enticed by evanescent below-market deals. It touts itself as a hybrid space for production and consumption, an aspirationally Warholian Slacktory for the postpandemic culture industry. Amenities abound, whether your self-care routine includes popping by YOUniverse Acupuncture in the twenty-third floor Water Lounge for an Eternal Youth Aculift or popping oysters and truffles from a circulating refreshment cart. The nucleus of the redevelopment is the 40,000-square-foot cultural space Water Street Projects, fittingly being inaugurated with a food-, care-, and domination-themed eatertainment concept—comprising the exhibition Yes, Chef and associated North African/Roman pop-up restaurant Black Caesar.
Yes, Chef, curated by Zoe Lukov, aims to spatchcock contemporary food fetishism (see the FX original series The Bear, which shares its catchphrase with the exhibition title) as it draws lines between the authoritarian underpinnings of restaurant culture and other interhuman forms of consumption. Eroticism, colonialism, maternalism, cultural identity, protest, survival—all are processed through epicurean metaphor.
Water Street Associates Building Ben Nadler
In the first gallery I wander through, lust and gluttony swirl into jubilant kitsch. Chloe Wise’s crouton-bejeweled and dressing-bukkaked romaine chandelier provides an illuminating entry point (Caesar Salad Chandelier, 2021). A randy digit curls into a jar of gefilte fish in Eric Yahnker’s Fingering Gefilte Fish (2011). Marilyn Minter’s chocolate-dipped bananas (Banana Split, 1989) dribble coprophilic brown.
Uneasy visions of culinary care arrest. Alison Saar’s breasted cast-iron skillets (Suckle I, II and III, 2007) reify Black women’s domestic labor into blunt instruments and serve as stoic ripostes to the lewd food on display in the earlier gallery. Another kitchenware chimera, Janine Antoni’s daintily minatory Umbilical (2000), balances an heirloom silver teaspoon between negative impressions of the artist’s jaw and her mother’s hand.
In one area, a desert of parched structures rises from the clean FiDi-skylined space, challenging the Instagrammable environs (the chrome-and-carpet Xanadu’s on-trend pairing of sleekness and hulking, flamboyant inelegance is introduced in WSA’s lobby with a selfie-inviting Frank Olke “Pedus” bed) with an earthy, crispy anti-aesthetic. Nari Ward’s burnt foam snowmen, sprinkled with electronic bits and mango seeds, form a torpid army of unknowable potential (Mango Tourist, 2011). Nearby, Kiyan Williams has deep-fried an American flag into a soiled wall of batter (What Emerges After The Fire, or An Object Reborn in Flames [scorched and suspended flag], 2024). Jeffrey Meris’s peanut-shell towers (Light, Medium, Dark, 2024) loom over the platform on which he had, earlier in the afternoon of my visit, drenched himself in a reduction of Coca-Cola in his performance Sugar, Daddy—both ingredients evoking traces of his mother’s labor running a store from his childhood porch.
WSA touts itself as a hybrid space for production and consumption, an aspirationally Warholian Slacktory for the postpandemic culture industry.
Black Caesar (2024), a matryoshka-like rendition of Leptis-born Roman ruler Septimius Severus by Tavares Strachan, presides over a phantasmal field of rice grass and—à la the dramatic doorways of P. F. Chang’s—the mouth of its namesake restaurant. The fleeting eatery transmogrifies Strachan’s sculpture into a prix fixe dinner that begins with the titular racialized salad: a cylinder of romaine draped in languid anchovies and encircled in an unctuous black-garlic dressing, an umami tsunami of campfire char and fishy funk, accompanied by a glistening laurel wreath of bread (a welcome conceptual soaker). Delicateness and decadence dance on my plate as cacio e pepe gnocchi the size of Ping-Pong balls discharge ricotta cream.
The associative playfulness of both the exhibition and pop-up eschews the reverence currently crusting around food culture: There is nary a utopian mushroom here, no trace of television’s deference to tweezered culinary genius. Unmediated self-seriousness would be a poor fit for such a setting (though opening weekend did feature the workshop “Tools for Revolution” with featured artist and BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors—begging the age-old question of whether the revolution will erupt from the creative wing of an experimental FiDi real estate venture). The confluence of blithe excess and right-thinking liberalism strike an appropriate tone for WSA: a hypercapitalized, multihyphenate atelier of influence where work is restyled as play, development as curation.
“A ****ing joy.”
As the Adams administration funnels money to developers with splashy solutions to record-breaking vacancies, this zhuzhed erstwhile cube farm has already cultivated a tenant wait list, promising to bring the office, the museum, the restaurant, the spa, the matcha café, and even the revolution under the same roof and brand. Will WSA’s olio of cultural capital and sceney hedonism, plus a garnish of social justice, coalesce into a recipe for success in Manhattan’s wasteland of wilting, dormant offices? Herbaceous and piquant oils blur around a whispering branzino; braised harissa lamb turns to silk over broken rice; and the voice in my fed head is lulled into acquiescence: Yes, Chef. Hail Caesar. Eat me. Incubate me.