To nourish the artistic soul

Who would quibble with the notion that food — both the preparation and oftentimes the eating of it — is art? From the first Dada bites of rice cereal fed to you by a babbling mother to six-course, wine-soaked dinners in the style of Caravaggio, food satisfies much more than mere physical need. But what food do you serve when the guest has come for some aesthetic sustenance but hankers for something more in tune with the palate than the palette. Thanks to recent expansions, two newly opened museum cafés think they know the answer and have offered up their culinary arts for the consideration of their patrons.

Delicious salads are served at the IMA Café.

Much has been said about Wolfgang Puck’s new fine-dining restaurant at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, with panoramic vistas of the grounds and eclectic cuisine inspired by California and Puck’s native Austria. But what about the more humble eats you’re likely to eat on a quick visit to the museum? Just when you never wanted to see food on a plastic tray again, Puck, whose omnipresent face is now on anything from canned soup to frozen pizza, has resurrected this utilitarian style of midday dining, making it the aesthetic complement to the museum’s collections.

Adjacent to Puck’s, the IMA Café offers a soothing atmosphere, with a spacious, conversation-friendly dining room in spicy pumpkin and cinnamon hues. Inside the immaculate cafeteria, culinary treats invitingly arrayed make choosing difficult. Pristine salads — Cobb, Niçoise — and bottles of sparkling pear and watermelon juice ($1.50) reside in refrigerated cases. A field greens salad ($3) offered perfect, unblemished greens with slender carrot slivers and coin-sized cucumber slices. A piquant Chinese mustard dressing lent distinct flavors of soy sauce and sesame oil.

An impressive sandwich counter offers such toppings as aged white cheddar and grilled onions chilling on mounds of ice. At a small panini and pizza station, you can get one of Wolfgang’s now-famous pizzas. While the choices were a bit redundant, the fresh mozzarella pizza ($6) was a luscious pie with colorful peppers and plenty of gooey cheese on one of the best crusts around. A meatball panini ($6) wasn’t as successful, with slightly over-processed meatballs and artificial-tasting tomato sauce, but hearty bread was expertly grilled.

Clam chowder ($2.50/cup) was thinner than some versions but chockfull of real clams, hearty vegetables and smoky bacon. Self-serve desserts included a gorgeously light chocolate truffle cake ($4) with a molten center and a raspberry cream cake ($4) that, while slightly dry, packed plenty of tangy raspberry flavor. Avoid the temptation to grab a lemon from oversized glass jars at the cash register. They’re just props that, while superfluous, show the care taken to compose lunchtime with an artist’s eye.

Maize (not corn) dogs with cilantro ketchup are just one indication that Sky City Café, in the newly renovated Eiteljorg Museum overlooking the canal, appeals, if not too rigorously, to the spirit of the artworks in the museum’s galleries. While the bias is to the Southwest, rather than native peoples from across the country, the menu exhibits some tasty innovations on lunch standards. Prepared in the kitchens of Kahn’s Katering, soups are fresh and change daily, and wraps, salads and sandwiches include surprises like prickly pear nectar and jicama. Vegetarian offerings abound.

Perhaps most inviting is the view of the downtown skyline rising above the canal, which makes a stunning backdrop for a midday meal. Here, on a gorgeous late-summer day, the name of the place finally made sense, as the sky and totems of urban life made a strikingly diverse tableau above our table.
Lunch combos ($6) allowed us to taste several of the café’s lunchtime treats. Rich roasted red pepper bisque had a tasty undertone of parmesan, if just a hint of rosemary. An ambitious Santa Fe beef salad included somewhat inconsistently fresh greens but quite tasty spice-rubbed seared beef. Shredded jicama, queso fresco and a very mild pico de gallo got lost a bit, and the “natural lemon and wild cilantro dressing” added only a mild flavor, despite its intriguing description. Artfully corralled into a crisp tortilla collar, however, this was legions beyond typical lunch offerings.

An “Anasazi” bean soup with smoky sausage was a wonderful cool-weather elixir with a full serving of veggies. A Mesa Blue Beef sandwich on focaccia had a nice amount of gorgonzola in a somewhat thin red-pepper aioli that lacked much kick. The focaccia, too, was a little dry, and might have been better warm, but fresh tomatoes and red onions rounded out a quite flavorful sandwich. A “Decadent Dessert Bar” ($2) was a super-sweet chocolate-cheesecake concoction we nibbled on while we enjoyed the almost better dessert of the café’s soul-enriching environs.

IMA Café
4000 Michigan Road
955-2315

Lunch
Tuesday–Sunday: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Food: 4 stars
Atmosphere: 3 1/2 stars
Service: 3 stars

Big Sky Café
500 W. Washington St.
636-9378

Lunch
Monday-Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Food: 3 1/2 stars
Atmosphere: 3 1/2 stars
Service: 3 stars