The Stellar New Restaurant That’s Put a Museum on the Map

Amant, the sprawling four-building, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot campus where Zoli lives, is the project of Lonti Ebers, a serious art collector and a MOMA trustee married to the Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt. The space opened, in 2021, to real notice in the art world and comparatively little beyond it—but Zoli, which opened in the spring, has put the museum on the map for people who don’t otherwise monitor the gallery circuit. The kitchen belongs to the chef Ned Baldwin, who, for more than a decade, has run Houseman, on Greenwich Street, one of Manhattan’s great under-the-radar restaurants. Much like Houseman, Zoli threads a very fine needle: warm and refined, familial and intellectual, drawing on a broadly eclectic pantry that has everybody eating well and living in harmony. Early one evening, a preschooler in heliotrope leggings was rolling around on a banquette, just barely avoiding the airspace of a pair of severe, linen-clad galleristas in vintage Ann Demeulemeester clomp boots, who sipped their glasses of pink Grenache and took in the gymnastics with equanimity.

The room itself, designed by the Brooklyn firm G.R.T. Architects, splits the difference between industrial brutalism and mid-century sleekness, and somehow avoids the predictability of either. Cinder-block walls, left raw and touched with an oatmeal cast, have the unexpected texture of a waffled blanket. A cherrywood staircase whips upward through the center of the triple-height room, toward a private dining space and a lushly landscaped rooftop bar; the same honey-colored timber shows up in the bannister, the millwork, the bones of the place. On the main level, the dining room and the bar are separated by Pierre Huyghe’s “Satellite,” an aquarium installation—three tanks, murky and rock-filled, with the occasional antenna-waving crustacean—that lends the otherwise sunny interior a faintly sinister edge of imminent apocalypse.