New Minneapolis Institute of Art series offers gourmet meals amid precious artwork

Peggy Grieve scanned the room at a recent dinner party, looking for faces she recognized. There were her dining companions, of course — her son and his fiancée, sitting across from her. But just beyond the long, candlelit table, she spotted a man she thought she knew. He was wearing a blue bodysuit and a red cape. "St. Michael, I think," said the Sunfish Lake resident.

She spun in her chair and saw another figure behind her, with unmistakable curly locks flowing toward his shoulders. "Christ," she said, "I recognize."

"And there's Judith," pointed out Matthew Welch, who was sitting next to Grieve at the table, "holding the head of Holofernes."

This dinner party didn't have a time-traveling guest list, but it did have an extraordinary setting — in a rotunda of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, surrounded by towering oil paintings from the European Renaissance.

Grieve attended a first-of-its-kind public dinner in one of Mia's galleries for a multicourse meal designed by two top local chefs and inspired by two stunning new exhibitions. (Welch, seated beside her, is Mia's deputy director and chief curator.)

The Kaiseki Art and Dining Experience pairs the artwork from "Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan" and "Van Gogh and the Olive Groves," special exhibitions with seemingly little in common. But after tours through the galleries with the curators, guests sat down for a meticulous meal from chefs Shigeyuki Furukawa and Jamie Malone that explored the surprising intersections between hand-stitched Japanese robes and the thickly applied brushstrokes depicting the view of Provence from Van Gogh's hospital window.

"I'm always telling people, 'I'm working at the crossing point of food and art,'" said Furukawa, founder and co-owner of Kaiseki Furukawa restaurant in Minneapolis. "Finally, it became concrete."

While the museum has hosted donor receptions or rented out areas of its classical 1915 building for private parties, this is one of the rare times the public can buy tickets to a meal among the art, said Mia director and president Katie Luber. Even more unusual is that the food is inspired by the pieces themselves.

"It is an experiment," said Luber, who joined the museum in early 2020. "We wanted to try something that we hadn't seen before."

Luber came on just before COVID-19 shut down the museum — and its on-site restaurant. While the museum is nearly back to normal, the mezzanine restaurant, Agra Culture, never reopened. (The Agra Culture cafe on the lower level is still operating.)

"We're really intent on rebuilding our audience, because in the past we have had many, many visitors, and we're still working to regain those folks," she said. Food, she thought, could be a way.

Luber was considering how to remake the restaurant into something offering more of an experience to guests. In her previous job at the San Antonio Museum of Art, she'd overseen pop-up chef nights, and wanted to try that at Mia before reopening the restaurant. She began brainstorming with Malone, the James Beard-nominated chef, about a culinary way to get guests excited about the two new exhibits.

Known for her French technique, Malone has become increasingly interested in the crossover between French and Japanese cooking. At the same time, she was reading about Van Gogh, and learned that he had a strong interest in Japanese prints. While talking with Luber, Malone wondered aloud, "What if Van Gogh had gone to Japan?"

"We were like, 'Omigod, that would be amazing to explore,'" Luber said.

Finding connections

Malone invited Furukawa into the conversation, and they landed on the format of kaiseki, a traditional Japanese, seasonally inspired dinner that tells a story with each dish. The courses at the Mia dinner each came with a scroll that revealed the conceptual framework the chefs used to link the art to the food, and asked a question.

Questions like: "How was Japanese dining different from French? Van Gogh shunned luxury; would he have been more attracted to Japanese culinary sensibilities?" And "Kissaten were the Japanese equivalent of French cafes at the time. What late night conversations would artists have had over cigarettes in these spaces?"

Dishes alternated between classical Japanese and classical French cuisine, and nodded subtly to the art, especially to the textiles, many of which were created with natural materials such as fish skin, banana leaves, nettles and persimmon juice.

One course from Furukawa included a one-bite crab, crisp as a potato chip, that evoked the sea-life designs on a kimono in the textile show. Another, a jellied soup of vegetables and seafood, was served on an enormous leaf that brought to mind Van Gogh's sunflowers. One of the wine pairings, selected by Bill Summerville, came from the region where Van Gogh was hospitalized.

"It was more like, 'Go find the connection,' so it wasn't right there in your face," said Andreas Marks, curator of the Japanese textiles exhibition. "To me, I thought the courses were very harmoniously working together."

The dinner series, launched earlier this month, will continue on select Wednesdays through Sept. 7. Luber is considering hosting another dinner when a Botticelli exhibit opens this fall. Eventually, she hopes to make exhibit-tied dinners a regular occurrence in the restaurant, using Mia's vast collection as inspiration.

Beyond red wine

The dinners have been a logistical challenge for the chefs, serving multiple courses without a traditional kitchen. And because there is no permanent infrastructure for dining, the events have been costly for the museum. It is for guests, too, at $375 a ticket.

But for those who have been able to attend, the delights went beyond the culinary and the artistic. The affair is an intimate one, limited to 45 guests at one long table. At the first dinner, to Luber's astonishment, attendees came from as far away as Finland.

There's also the potent, almost eerie stillness of being in the museum after hours.

"It's super-cool to be able to be in the museum when it's not open to the public," Malone said. "I feel like being around that artwork, a quiet moment feels really powerful."

The dinner events are taking place in the third-floor rotunda, across an atrium from one of Van Gogh's olive grove paintings. The European oil paintings of the biblical figures Grieve had been identifying are hung high on the walls, well out of reach of spills and splashes.

"We didn't feel like there was really much risk, and everyone was very respectful and careful, as well," Luber said.

Luber hopes future dinners will be in other locations in the museum. One place they won't be, however, is in the galleries where textiles are displayed, because they are uncased and vulnerable.

Even so, Marks was on the edge of his seat during the first dinner.

"I was kind of like, 'Thank God we're not in my gallery,' " he said. "It's surreal to some extent, because we have these strict rules. We already say no food and drinks. Red wine? That's like going nuclear."

Tickets to "Kaiseki, a Story of Van Gogh and Japan in 1880" are available here.