ArtScience Culture Lab and Café in Kendall Square is an unusual place. For one thing, it has its own —a curved space created in the back of
the dining room with large display panels where experts from around the world come to share ideas on food, nutrition, and helping people for whom those
are critical issues. And that hall is one of the least unusual things about the restaurant.
Higher on the list: First is founder David Edwards, professor at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, previously best known for his inventions and the businesses and nonprofits built around them. Next might be the poured into drinks courtesy of one of Edwards’ newest inventions, which is just one of the innovative preparation methods and ingredients used to add unexpected flavors, textures, and scents to ArtScience’s French-leaning food and drink menus. It’s a restaurant best understood not only though its tastes, but through its sights and sounds.
“Pioneering is an optimistic activity,” Edwards says. “You wake up alone at a frontier and if you're not hopeful, there's no hope.”
Being a pioneer means taking chances and you don’t do that unless you believe there’s a good change you’re going to succeed. “It's challenging, as a pioneer, to bring discoveries from the frontier to places and people who might benefit from it,” Edwards says. “Risk taking is something that pioneers love to do. They don't love to do this because they like to fail, they love to do this because [risk] is pretty inherent with discovery and ultimately innovation.”
That sense of optimism and risk taking is present in everything about ArtScience.
Just stepping into the space for the first time gives you the feeling this is what
the 21st century was supposed to be: a time and place where people come together to solve problems, as opposed to thinking separation and division will make problems someone else’s.
The design is clean without being sterile, quiet but not hushed. It is decorated sparsely with art and fixtures that are Over part of the bar is a cantilevered group of metallic hexagons. Among where diners sit is a long, V-shaped sculpture that elicits the ocean and the shore at its center. It’s something with familiar elements in an unexpected setting, which is also the ArtScience approach to food. Like the carrot cake they serve made with whole roast carrots. “You take a familiar idea, something that people are comfortable with, and you use that to alter and change and bring people out
of their comfort zone,”pastry chef Ryan Boya says.
Pioneering, either physically or intellectually, means risking something.
For a mountain climber it’s their life, for a scientist it’s their reputation, for
a restauranteur it’s staying in business. Combining the familiar with the new serves as a type of insurance that ArtScience customers will come along on
its explorations.
“We did a sea urchin panna cotta … that was a little out there,” says Benjamin Lacy, the restaurant’s Bay State-born executive chef. “It was just very much something that people really knew nothing about. And with a leap of faith, we were able to reach certain guests and kind of expand what they thought about food...What [a customer] might inherently see as a risk is really just refining something.”
Although ArtScience is haute cuisine and, understandably, aimed at people with refined palettes, Edwards works to make it an inclusive, not exclusive, locale.
“Our price point is pretty low,” he says. “If you come in the weekend, you'll see a lot of students and graduate students and postdocs, and it was important for us that we be open for them.”
You take a familiar idea, something that people are comfortable with, and you use that to alter and change and bring people out of the comfort zone.
“
”
lecture hall
clouds of flavor
unfamiliar without feeling alien.
“The bar is our primary site for experimentation,” Edwards says.
It’s also the easiest place to see why the restaurant is called ArtScience Culture Lab and Café, with prominently featured distillation apparatus with flasks and tubing. This equipment produces more intense and colorless versions of liquors, as well as
swirling glass
machines used to add smells,
Innovation
at the bar
Interested in managing risk for your own business?
Cross Insurance offers a variety of insurance products to help mitigate risk and offer peace of mind, so you can focus on the things that matter.
Let Cross help you put your best future forward.
LEARN MORE
How innovation drives the curious and creative menu at Café ArtScience
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Constantine von Hoffman
Sam Crimmins
liquid forms of flavors like mint. There are also like lavender or aged scotch, to alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. At the front of the bar, next to the swizzle sticks and napkins, are pipettes so customers can sample a concoction or three when deciding which drink they would like.
Consider trying the Rhinoceros, one of the café’s signature drinks. It combines a high-end bourbon with honey, egg white, cumin, Himalayan black salt, cardamom, saffron, and lemon. The resulting flavors, textures, and smells are designed to engage many different senses. This kind of innovation is a far, far cry from not-so-long-ago, when you could add cranberry juice to a Screwdriver and call it a brand new drink (a Madras). Of course, you can easily get those old standbys at ArtScience too...but why would you?
See how Edwards and the chefs at ArtScience take on risk for the sake of innovation:
How innovation drives the curious and creative menu at Café ArtScience
Constantine von Hoffman
ArtScience Culture Lab and Café in Kendall Square is an unusual place. For one thing, it has its own —a curved space created in the back of the dining room with large display panels where experts from around the world come to share ideas on food, nutrition, and helping people for whom those are critical issues. And that hall is one of the least unusual things about the restaurant.
Higher on the list: First is founder David Edwards, professor at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, previously best known for his inventions and the businesses and nonprofits built around them. Next might be the poured into drinks courtesy of one of Edwards’ newest inventions, which is just one of the innovative preparation methods and ingredients used to add unexpected flavors, textures, and scents to ArtScience’s French-leaning food and drink menus. It’s a restaurant best understood not only though its tastes, but through its sights and sounds.