New dining spot for La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Cucina Urbana’s Borkum opens The Kitchen, where all the seating is outdoors
“Our main objective throughout the expansion and in reopening has been to create a more welcoming, inclusive and sustainable institution.” director of earned revenue at the museum
Fresh off opening her version of the classic Jewish deli last year, longtime restaurateur Tracy Borkum is returning to a more recent venture of hers — museum dining — at the newly renovated and expanded Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla.
The new outdoor venue, The Kitchen, made its debut Friday in a courtyard area of the modern art museum, surrounded by lush landscaping designed by the same New York architect behind the $105 million re-imagining of the ocean
view landmark.
It was just a little over a year ago that Borkum’s Urban Kitchen Group opened its first museum dining spot — a sleek new restaurant called Artifact, housed in the remodeled Mingei museum in Balboa Park.
Open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday, The Kitchen may eventually extend its hours for dinner service, but there is no timeline yet for that, Borkum said. In addition to the 2,420-square-foot garden cafe where there is seating for 80, there is a smaller space inside the original museum building that Borkum’s group has designed for selling a curated selection of goods, including coffee, tea, house-made pastries and grab-and-go food for breakfast and lunch.
“The outdoor space is very gardeny, and we’ve added to it by including large green shade umbrellas and soft coloring,” said Borkum. “It’s nicely protected from the wind and there’s not too much crazy sun. And in the interior space, (designer) Jennifer Luce worked on that. It’s very respectful to the remodel and the rest of museum, using a lot of metal and grays with touches of green that we brought in from the garden.”
The new outdoor venue came about as a result of a solicitation the museum made a couple of years ago for dining proposals well in advance of the reopening last year of the expanded museum. Urban Kitchen Group was chosen from among a number of interested bidders, not only to operate new eateries but to also do catering work for the museum.
“While there were a number of other organizations who were interested in the restaurant space, at the conclusion of the in-person presentations,
the committee unanimously decided to award the bid to UKG (Urban Kitchen Group),” said April Farrell, director of earned revenue at the museum. “Our main objective throughout the expansion and in reopening has been to create a more welcoming, inclusive and sustainable institution ... It will be part of the visitor experience as they journey through the galleries, our beautiful terraces and now to The Kitchen, too.”
Borkum said she can foresee a time where she will take on more museum dining projects and not just in San Diego, where her restaurant group also operates a to-go dining space at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
Those venues have raised the profile of Borkum’s growing culinary portfolio, so much so that she recently received an email from an Ohio museum interested in partnering on a potential project.
“We would love to do more venues in other museums
on the West Coast,” said Borkum, whose restaurant group has a half dozen restaurants in addition to the museum locations. “It’s different than with just a landlord where you have a regular lease,” she said. “This is more of a partnership. There are a lot of decisions they participate in, whereas in a restaurant, you wouldn’t run those kinds of decisions by your landlord.
“I think we were chosen because of our understanding for art and how we treat food.”
Chef-partner Tim Kolanko said the museum’s setting on the coast helped inspire the Mediterraneanfocused menu that makes use of bolder spices and marinades to enliven dishes like the swordfish kebab plate and roasted chicken marinated in whipped garlic, Aleppo pepper and sumac. Overseeing the museum project is Executive Chef Jeff Armstrong.
Still in the works for the La Jolla museum is a planned tasting menu experience
that will be offered in a private event venue known as the Sahm Sea View Room. The plan is to serve lunch there on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays during lunchtime. Four-course menus will be priced from $50 to $65, not including wine pairings. It is expected to be ready by late spring.
Originally designed as a private event space, it will still be used for that at other times during the week. As part of the Urban Kitchen Group’s new venture there, it will be handling the catering for that and other museum events. Also planned for the 840-square-foot glassenclosed dining room are periodic collaborative dinners bringing together chefs, farmers and other artisans.
“It’s a pretty small space, so it’s not a big gangbuster revenue-type of experience,” Kolanko said. “But the view and the way it’s situated, it’s more a place to create a great, elevated experience.”