If you’ve ever contemplated the ephemeral crossroads where art meets deer burgers, you’re either…
A) Weird, but fun-weird.
B) A few drinks in at Manuela, the Arts District’s eye-catching new restaurant curled up inside the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery’s courtyard that’s soft-opening Wednesday for lunch.
There’s no C.
Imagine the industrial design trend and the mid-century design trend conceived a genetically blessed, indoor/outdoor love child. It may resemble this nook of deliberately flaking brick walls and brass accents spread with velvet-sheathed bistro chairs, two marble bars and a Raymond Pettibon in its private room. But a slideshow is worth a thousand words.
Bring a fellow art lover. Start at the patio bar with an Ole Hickory (mezcal, peaches, rose geranium and lemon). Then, roam the gallery. Deem some perceptive individual’s tortured expression “interesting,” then make your way back for dinner.
The chef’s a Texan. So he knows his way around a smoker, wood, fire and the deer burgers, baby backs and fried quail with watermelon that you’ll eat at the open kitchen. Here’s the menu.
And sure, places talk about being local and everything. But this place grows everything right off of its courtyard. You can even go visit the chickens they get eggs from.
You can’t go visit the deer burgers.
