At The Table: Mathieu Canet

The original FOOD opened in 1971, in SoHo, on the corner of Prince and Wooster. Run by three artists, Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard and Gordon Matta-Clark. Goodden was a dancer and choreographer, Girouard a video and performance artist, and Matta-Clark, an artist and trained architect. All three made work that prioritised and developed new kinds of experiential and site specific art making. FOOD, to an extent, grew out of that. 

On the one hand FOOD was a functioning restaurant serving meals to paying guests, but it was also a kind of intervention in the fabric of the city and a space of community. Artists worked there and ate there. The cooking spanned from the conceptual to the simple. With the exception of Fanelli’s on Mercer Street, when FOOD opened in SoHo there was still not much to be found there. The area was predominantly industrial, full of sweatshops and factories, mainly empty at night. Slowly artists were moving in to turn ex-manufacturing spaces into studios, beginning a process that’s seen SoHo transformed into what we recognise it as today.   

Earlier this year, artist Lucien Smith, and chef Mathieu Canet, relaunched FOOD. Although it’s probably more correct to think of it as an homage, or iteration, rather than strict relaunch. This FOOD can be found in a narrow strip of a restaurant on a corner of Canal Street. Lucien, for a time, was the hottest young artist in the world, whose work was selling for so much on the secondary market that he eventually withdrew from the glare of the artworld. Bordeaux-born Mathieu made his name as a chef at Le Dauphin in Paris, which he left in 2023. In the years since he’s popped up around the world: working in residence from Florence to Austria, as well as taking over various spots around Paris. 

“I see this more as a reinterpretation of FOOD. We’re trying to keep the legacy and spirit of the original, but we’re also trying to make it understandable and relevant in 2025.” 

Mathieu and Lucien met six years ago through a mutual friend. Lucien was doing a brand collaboration and organised a private dinner at Le Dauphin. The roots of the project were sewn then. Lucien saw something similar between the way Mathieu thought about cooking and the way he approached art. They started speaking about opening a restaurant together, although almost everything changed between those initial discussions and the actual restaurant they opened. 

“I see this more as a reinterpretation of FOOD,” Mathieu says, smoking a cigarette outside the restaurant one afternoon. “We’re trying to keep the legacy and spirit of the original, but we’re also trying to make it understandable and relevant in 2025.” 

“I love cooking in New York, the city has a great energy. We find so many amazing ingredients here, we’ve been getting this great beef from the Amish.”

In the few short months it's been open it's generated plenty of controversy and even more loyal fans. New York magazine ran a hit piece on it, which didn’t focus very much on the actual food being served, but on everything else that might surround a famous artist opening a cool new restaurant in Downtown New York. But many people I speak to are already quite ardent fans of the food though, coming by for lunch or dinner most days.  

In some senses it’s not too dissimilar to what Mathieu was doing at Le Dauphin: which was a pristine and beautiful dining room, stacked with mirrors and various coloured marble surfaces, arranged around a counter. But for such a pristine room, the food at Le Dauphin was inviting and easy, and the atmosphere welcoming. The cooking at FOOD is resolutely unpretentious: each day the menu changes based on the ingredients to be found nearby in Chinatown and the ideas and inspirations of Mathieu. Lunch is simpler, a menu of soups and sandwiches, in the evening, Mathieu gets more expressive.

“We try to offer simple, tasty, soulful food that’s both ambitious and accessible. We use really good products, prepared in a simple way and without ego.”

“I love cooking in New York, the city has a great energy, and it’s been a really good surprise in terms of products,” Matthieu says. “We find so many amazing ingredients. We’ve been getting this great beef from the Amish, a lot of really good vegetables. It’s a big city, and similar to Paris in many ways, but less conservative too in the tastes of people.”

Mathieu is not focussed on fancy, haute, presentations. If there’s a legacy of conceptualism that comes with the history of FOOD, and an artist-run space, the concept here might simply be the honesty of what’s offered. He’s not overthinking things, instead the idea is to make a space full of “kindness”, somewhere open and comfortable. “We try to offer simple, tasty, soulful food that’s easy to understand. I want it to be both ambitious and accessible—we use really good products, prepared in a simple way and without ego. If there’s a concept it’s in the simplicity, I think that’s why people feel comfortable and like the space, because you don’t need any keys to understand it. You just take it as it comes.”

“We’re forming a community who feel close to what we offer. It comes naturally; we don’t have to verbalise it.”

And so on offer, although changing each day, could be a ribeye steak or roast beef, chicken piquillo stew, noodles, tomato with raspberries, celeriac veloute, heaped salads of lush lettuces. But there’s a playfulness and restraint to what’s being proposed. It’s firmly rooted in Chinatown and the ingredients on offer nearby, or being shipped into New York from Upstate, as well as the various overlapping communities to be found around Canal Street, and a respect for the history of FOOD and what it represents.    

“I think it’s a social experiment—as all businesses are, and especially when you open something new. You meet new people, a new city, a new life. Of course, you get in touch with all the human beings around you. We’re forming a community of people who feel close to what we offer. It comes naturally; we don’t have to verbalise it. We aren’t overthinking it.”

The space has informed that, designed by ANY NYC, a work by On Kawara hangs on the wall, the stools are by English-designer Max Lamb, strange sculptural multicoloured bulbous creatures. FOOD’s narrow spaces define, also, the possibility and restriction in the preparation. 

The original FOOD only lasted three years, but left an outsized impact on the world of eating: it pushed seasonality, experimentation, vegetarian food, it served sushi and sashimi, it even pioneered the architectural intervention of the open kitchen. All of which seem very familiar to us now. But it also informed the art practices of people like Carston Holler or Rikrit Tiravanija, who have used food as a form of artistic intervention, or Nicolas Bourriaud and relational aesthetics, which explored the way humans interacted as a kind of artwork. If that original FOOD was conceived as much as art installation as business, this iteration is, more concretely, a restaurant. I wonder if Mathieu has considered what Matta-Clark, who died in 1978 might think of FOOD’s revival, and the context a restaurant like this would occupy now. “I hope he’d think nothing,” Mathieu says, “And just spend a good night eating with us. That’s all I wish.”