For three nights last week, the unfinished lobby of the soon-to-open Sanctuary Hotel was bedecked with colorful Pop Art-style graphics and filled with diners supping on a menu created by a 15-year-old chef, Greg Grossman. The temporary installation and eatery, dubbed the "Pop Art Pop Up," was a promotional vehicle concocted by the property's owner-operators, Hank and Brandon Freid, and Alan Philips's company, the Guerrilla Culinary Brigade, designed largely to build buzz for the May debut of the theater district hotel. The concept built on the series of pop-up restaurants started by Philips last year and debuted to press and friends on March 10.
The theme was Pop Art, so event designer Devinn Bruce and teenage culinary talent Grossman looked to iconic works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Damien Hirst, Keith Haring, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. Bruce translated Lichtenstein's cartoon artistry, Warhol's infamous monoprints, and other ideas into room decor with decals and masking tape, while Grossman paid homage to the artists through the shapes and colors of his dishes.
Rather than hang framed art around the space, Bruce opted to apply imagery directly to the walls and looked to decals to stretch his limited budget and convey the ephemeral nature of the pop-up. Colored dots lined one surface, representing Hirst's well-known "LSD" piece, while black masking tape formed a frame and diagonal background for a Lichtenstein-style cartoon on another. The designer was able to find stick-on reproductions of Haring's works, including "Barking Dog" and the untitled, three-eyed face that was part of a 1982 mural on Houston, and incorporated those into a larger installation. To keep the focus on the kaleidoscopic decor, Bruce chose plain Ikea tables and assembled the flat-packed structures on site.
Grossman, who was brought into the project by Philips, held court in a makeshift kitchen adjacent to the pop-up restaurant and crafted a five-course meal based on specific paintings, prints, and sculptures by the Pop artists. For instance, the amuse bouche was inspired by Koon's "Balloon Dog (Orange)" and consisted of carrot that had been frozen inside a balloon. Another dish was influenced by Warhol's Marilyn Monroe monoprints, with pieces of beef, lamb, salmon, and bass sitting atop different colored sauces.
