This year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair is less than two weeks away. If you’re traveling to Chicago for the event, be sure to pick up a copy of our annual Taste of the Town guide at the Merchandise Mart. Although, really, why wait until you arrive to make dining plans? You can read all our restaurant recommendations—conveniently classified by lunch, dinner, and drinks—in the online version of the guide, now available on our Live@NeoCon site.

Robert, a new restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design

When Sarabeth’s closes its Whitney outpost in the middle of this month, it will mark the end of the restaurant’s 19-year presence in the museum’s basement (it was the first private restaurant to operate within a New York City museum).

And when Robert, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, begins dinner service, also in the middle of this month, it will mark the full opening of the city’s latest museum restaurant (the café currently serves lunch and tea).  As Sarabeth’s closes shop—Danny Meyer, of Shake Shack fame, plans to open a new Whitney eatery in the fall and a pop-up café in the meantime—Robert will hope to duplicate the recipe (figuratively, of course) that kept the Whitney fixture in business since 1991.  The food is billed as “American fare,” but, for now, it’s the décor—custom tables and chairs by the architect Philip Michael Wolfson, lighting by Johanna Grawunder, furniture by Vladimir Kagan, and a video installation by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp—that takes top billing.

Previously: We took a quick look at the Guggenheim Museum’s new restaurant and admired a line of  fiberglass furniture by Vladimir Kagan. In 2008, Peter Hall argued that critics of the Museum of Arts and Design missed the real point of the building.

Last night was the press preview for The Wright, a sleek new restaurant shoehorned into a tiny space at the southwest corner of the Guggenheim Museum. For anyone who remembers its former manifestation—a maroon-walled café crowded with tables and framed photographs—the new interior will seem like a major departure, and an appealing one at that. Designed by the New York architect Andre Kikoski, it is pristine white with a few bold exceptions: the saturated-blue banquettes, a curving walnut wall above the bar, and a series of powder-coated aluminum planks mounted to the walls and ceiling. The last turns out to be a site-specific sculpture by the British artist Liam Gillick (who also happens to be Kikoski’s neighbor) titled The horizon produced by a factory once it had stopped producing views.

As for the cuisine, it will be what you might call Upper East Side comfort food: seared diver scallops, Maine lobster, slow-roasted suckling pig. (The chef is Rodolfo Contreras, a David Bouley protégé.) The Wright opens to the public on December 11. A few more snapshots follow, after the jump. Read more…

Four Seasons ashtrays—which, according to the critic Ada Louise Huxtable, were meant to be stolen. Photo: Paul Makovsky

The Four Seasons restaurant is always a fun place to go to for a special occasion. Last evening was especially so, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation presented Alex von Bidder and Julian Niccolini, managing partners of the restaurant, with the President’s Award for their longstanding stewardship and preservation of the restaurant’s interiors. It’s the first time that the President’s Award has been given in recognition of a modern interior—something the preservationists and developers need to focus on more these days. Read more…

Photos: Eric Laignel/courtesy Tihany Design

“Everybody remembers La Fonda del Sol, but nobody remembers eating there. Believe me, I’ve asked.” Over lunch at the latest iteration of the famous restaurant, opened by Patina Restaurant Group earlier this year, Adam D. Tihany’s bon mots nearly outshine the space he designed. But, he might argue, that’s the point. Read more…