Nobody would accuse Lucien Smith of being authentic, least of all Smith himself. “I’ve at all times role-played as a painter, role-played as a nice artist,” he says, swiveling in a chair in his studio. “I don’t know the way a lot of it’s real and the way a lot of it’s an act. Perhaps the entire thing.” His earliest public position was wunderkind, which he took on in 2011 when he shot out of artwork faculty, Supreme beanie askew, and began promoting work that flipped at public sale for almost $400,000. His first massive sale was a panorama he copied from Winnie-the-Pooh, and his first massive sequence comprised splatter work made by spewing paint from a fireplace extinguisher. These brain-dead Pollocks begged critics to fit him right into a development they referred to as Zombie Formalism, a decorator-friendly aping of mid-century abstraction. Smith, who’s affable and informal and now makes airbrushed work of celebrities’ faces, welcomes comparisons. As we sit in his tall-windowed, high-ceilinged Chinatown loft, he lists off the artists whose careers he thinks he may need had if he’d saved up his momentum (Rashid Johnson, Jeff Koons, Cecily Brown), those whose careers he doesn’t need (Damien Hirst), and those he is likely to be channeling (Andy Warhol). “Perhaps every thing is spinoff, you already know?” he says with a smile. “Perhaps we’re all simply dwelling the lives of different individuals.”
Smith is 36. After a decade-plus of spinning his wheels — throughout which he dated and broke up with Marlene Zwirner, partied, stop his galleries (or was fired by them), watched his costs tank, partied extra, moved to Montauk, moved again, and obtained into crypto — he says he’s prepared for his subsequent act. In June, he’ll soft-open a restaurant referred to as Meals, named after the legendary artist-run restaurant that opened in 1971 and is woven into the historical past of the Soho loft scene. Smith says he needs his Meals to select up the place the primary Meals left off, corresponding to by hiring a bunch of artists to work there. The unique was based by Carol Goodden, a dancer and photographer, and her then-boyfriend, the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark. With common hours and an enormous solid of occasional employees, it operated as art-world employer, cafeteria, and de facto assembly spot for everybody from Trisha Brown and her dancers (of which Goodden was one) to Philip Glass’s collaborators. The brand new Meals is being opened by Smith, a inventive director and producer named Ken Farmer, and Laurence Chandler, a menswear designer who used to handle Ye’s model, Yeezy. The unique was born on Prince Road at a time when working a few shifts per week would possibly cowl your loft’s hire. The brand new Meals can be in Dimes Sq., two blocks from a luxurious resort. Smith says that irrespective of how “corny” anybody thinks it’s, Dimes Sq. is for artists. “That is my Soho,” Smith says, “and I’m very into it.”
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He leads me down the steps of his studio constructing, out the door, and some steps down Canal Road to the nook of Eldridge, the place he rolls up the gate of a former dumpling restaurant. This can be Meals. Proper now, it’s a building zone with a newly put in HVAC unit coated in a thick layer of mud. Smith needs to order the summer time for experimentation. He’s not afraid of failure; in his view, he already failed as an artist as a result of he by no means found out a sustainable observe. “I had an unrealistic first publicity to success,” he says. “For at the least 5 years of my life, I used to be like, I need my 20s again. And I type of didn’t do something, and that was nice, after which it turned boring. Then I used to be like, I need my profession again, however fuck, pissed it down the drain.” He’d discovered about Meals whereas learning on the Cooper Union, and round 5 years in the past he began pondering somebody ought to revive it. Smith is a streetwear man with collabs logic — he has modeled for Supreme, and Virgil Abloh made a shirt with certainly one of his work on it. So at first, Smith tried to get Ye concerned. Chandler was certainly one of his collectors and he knew Yeezy was exploring the potential for culinary tasks, so he recommended to Chandler that they open Meals underneath Ye’s model. “I used to be sending him all of this Meals stuff, like, ‘You bought to indicate Ye this. Should you guys open a restaurant, I’ll come give you the results you want,’” he says. (Chandler says he by no means proposed this to Ye.) After Ye fired Chandler in 2022, Smith texted Chandler, “Yo, I nonetheless wish to do that Meals factor.” Smith says Chandler handles the monetary stuff and finds buyers and partnerships; regardless of Smith’s self-described expertise for self-promotion, he says he isn’t used to asking individuals for cash.
The unique Meals, which Goodden ran for about two years, wouldn’t have opened at every other time. Its complete DIY spirit hinged on being a part of Soho’s postindustrial period, when there have been hardly any eateries close by (apart from Fanelli’s) however there was loads of uncooked area. A lot of what made Meals distinctive — that it employed a variety of artists, served seasonal meals, and invited company to curate dinners — has since been absorbed into the logic of particular little downtown eating places. So why, other than the branding train, did Smith wish to use its identify? He says solely that “it wouldn’t have been truthful for me to open an artist-run restaurant with out giving some credit score to that authentic thought.” Jessamyn Fiore, a curator and co-director of the Property of Gordon Matta-Clark who’s seen artists stage dinners in tribute to Meals all over the place from Arkansas to Dubai, says she doesn’t know of anybody who has tried a recreation within the type of an precise restaurant. Fiore’s mom, Jane Crawford, is Matta-Clark’s widow, and Fiore, who has a special father, grew up within the East twentieth Road loft that Crawford and Matta-Clark arrange collectively. Fiore says Chandler and Smith sought her enter early on. “Lucien is giving it his personal spin,” she says. “I imply, I’m a curator. It’s not for me to inform an artist what their imaginative and prescient is.”
Meals 1971 had an ethereal, wood-table aesthetic, constructed out by artists together with Goodden, Matta-Clark, and the Louisiana-born Tina Girouard, who turned an integral a part of operations and would generally prepare dinner Cajun-inspired dishes. Meals 2025 can be an extended, counter-service area envisioned by industrial-design guys. The stools can be shiny epoxy in assorted colours and designed by the British artist and designer Max Lamb, who’s identified for wacky chairs; there can be one banquette within the again designed by Swiss model USM. Though some might say the purpose of Meals was its social scene, Smith initially wished his model to be out there solely as a supply merchandise on Uber Eats, a service he loves. “I wished to have the ability to publish, like, ‘That is going to be on Uber Eats tomorrow,’ and it’s one thing bogus, like a fried PB&J sandwich,” he says. But it surely turned out an Uber Eats Meals was “a tough idea to lift cash in opposition to.”
Smith, whose restaurant expertise is restricted to a middle-school summer time job at a pizzeria on Hearth Island, says he’ll be Meals’s director. Since each one who works there — together with him — can be cooking and serving meals, he thinks each merchandise on the day menu ought to be as easy to organize as a Chipotle bowl; he plans to supply a curry or stew of the day priced at round $8. He says it would flip into an ice-cream parlor for some time this summer time and jokes that he’s beginning the restaurant as a result of he doesn’t have a kitchen in his studio. After I ask for an instance of what else he thinks Meals ought to serve, Smith says, “Chinese language hen salad. Like, you actually can’t get that salad wherever in New York.” (The evening menu can be fancier, courtesy of French chef Mathieu Canet.) He additionally needs to rent a rotating solid of round 80 artists. Might that make the standard of the cooking inconsistent? He shrugs. “Issues like consistency are what have outlined a profitable restaurant, however the success charge of eating places is low,” he says. “So perhaps consistency isn’t a profitable factor. Perhaps inconsistency is one thing a restaurant wants.”
It’s true that Meals was by no means imagined to be like different eating places. Goodden says she and Matta-Clark got here up with the concept at certainly one of her dinner events, and he or she financed the restaurant with a household inheritance. Goodden emphasizes they “didn’t know what they had been doing. We merely did.” She calls lots of her choices “disastrous” — just like the Spanish tile she wished for the ground, which “echoed all of the noise.” Or her insistence on serving fresh-squeezed orange juice, which meant somebody needed to spend all day squeezing it. With no expertise working a enterprise, she priced some gadgets means too low and a way too excessive and offered bowls of soup at a loss. After about two years, she and Matta-Clark had been prepared to maneuver on. Unable to promote the restaurant — no regular restaurant house owners might perceive what they had been doing — they gave it to their most trusted assistant supervisor, who then ran off to Europe with all of the restaurant’s money. Someway, Meals survived underneath totally different house owners into the ’80s.
Goodden, who’s 85, now lives in New Mexico and trains horses. She says Smith reached out to her in 2023 and talked about he was fascinated with beginning a restaurant. She says he didn’t inform her he wished to name it Meals. “It was framed in some imprecise assertion, like there had been a spate of ‘new delicacies’ eating places and he was tempted to begin his personal, so he was curious how my concepts had progressed,” she says. “The subsequent factor I do know, a good friend of mine confirmed me a information story. And there’s FOOD, utilizing our emblem, all capitalized. I referred to as Lucien and stated, ‘What is that this?’ He despatched me photos of the area, which seemed actually slender to me.” She has chosen acceptance, she says, as a result of “there’s no level in making an attempt to cease it. He’s utilizing our identify and saying it’s a re-creation. I’ve pulled again from it. I want him nicely.” (Smith says his staff did inform Goodden he was relaunching Meals earlier than she noticed the information story however acknowledges some particulars might have been “misplaced in translation.”)
The primary Meals may need been a enterprise, however getting cash for its house owners was not the purpose. For Smith, that’s the level — he says it needs to be. Not too long ago, he’s been funding his varied tasks by promoting a few of his previous artworks that he saved again from his galleries, “however that’s working out.” He’s already dreaming about opening Meals in London, Paris, and Milan. “The unique Meals didn’t work, so I’ve to suppose like a capitalist and determine how we maintain this concept of ours thriving,” he says. “I’ve to consider scaling it.” After I counsel this can be in rigidity with the spirit of the unique, Smith interrupts me. “Yeah, or not,” he says, widening his eyes. “That’s the factor. Or not. It’s this straightforward: There’s a counter. On one aspect, there’s those who work there; on the opposite, there’s individuals consuming. The price to make the meals and pay individuals’s salaries is lower than how a lot we make from individuals shopping for the meals.” On the very least, he thinks it is going to be enjoyable. “I’m excited to be behind the counter at 2 a.m. and make some monstrosity of a soup — or an incredible soup, relying on my temper,” he says. “Individuals are shocked, but it surely’s precisely what I wish to be doing: grounding myself in one thing like having a job.”
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