Frick’s New Café Opens
The Frick Collection’s New Café Opens
June 6
Westmoreland Offers the Museum’s First Dining Experience for Visitors and Members
New York, NY (June 4, 2025) — On June 6, 2025, The Frick Collection opens Westmoreland, the first café at its Fifth Avenue home. The newly built addition is a highlight of the museum’s revitalized visitor experience, following its recently completed renovation and enhancement. Located on the second floor of the expansion designed by Selldorf Architects, the intimate café takes its name from the private Pullman train car the Frick family used, beginning in 1911, to travel between their homes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and farther afield. Featuring interior design by Bryan O’Sullivan Studio (BOSS) and a bespoke mural by artist Darren Waterston, Westmoreland offers an all-day, table-service menu conceived by Union Square Events (USE).
The café—a gift of the Margot and Jerry Bogert Family—has about fifty seats and is offered as an amenity for museum ticket holders and members. Same-day reservations can be made onsite at the museum. Westmoreland is open during regular museum hours. For further information, visit frick.org/cafe.
“As we continue to celebrate the Frick’s grand reopening, we are thrilled to debut the museum’s first-ever café,” said Axel Rüger, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director. “The new amenity helps bring our institution into the twenty-first century, and it will provide our visitors and members with a respite to enjoy conversation about the collection over refined food and beverages. Westmoreland’s interior by Bryan O’Sullivan Studio resonates with the elegance of Selldorf Architects’ expansion, amplifying the museum’s atmosphere of timeless beauty and extending the Frick experience beyond our galleries.”
DINING CONCEPTS EMBRACING THE PRESENT WITH A NOD TO THE PAST
At Westmoreland, Union Square Events (USE) brings its signature market-driven approach to the table, with an all-day menu built around peak-season produce and hand-selected ingredients from regional farms and purveyors. The café’s elevated American fare includes salads, pastas, savory soups, delectable entrées, and a pastry program. The culinary approach—led by Executive Chef Skyllar Hughes under the direction of USE’s Vice President of Culinary Operations, Nickolas Martinez—draws from both local seasonality and the Frick family’s historic menus, resulting in refined dishes such as a berry tart, echoing ingredients favored by Adelaide Frick, wife of the museum’s founder. In addition to local coffee and teas, the beverage program features European and American wines as well as spirit-forward and spirit-free cocktails. Selections are inspired by the Frick’s Webby-nominated video series and subsequent book Cocktails with a Curator, reinterpreted by USE’s beverage team to create elegant, narrative-rich drinks such as the “Widow’s Kiss” and “The Saint.”
Martinez commented, “Westmoreland offers attentive table service to create an experience that feels both intimate and elevated. Our menu takes a one-course approach, with thoughtfully composed plates intended to stand alone. Every dish is rooted in seasonal ingredients, refined in presentation, and deeply personal. We aim to offer a thoughtful pause during a visit to the museum.”
TRANSPORTIVE DESIGN INSPIRED BY TRAVEL AND TASTE
Westmoreland overlooks the Frick’s restored 70th Street Garden, and its interiors, conceived by BOSS, draw inspiration from all three of the museum’s green spaces as well as historic finishes throughout the 1914 mansion. The café references floral motifs on the bar surrounds and embraces a palette of deep greens and soft pastels, complementing a dreamlike mural in the foyer and dining area.
The café features custom furnishings, including bespoke walnut tables with brass detailing and upholstered wooden dining chairs, as well as a polished walnut bar with cast-glass finishes. Wall banquettes and tables of four at the center of the room balance intimacy and conviviality. The host station and bar cabinet lend an additional tailored touch shared by Westmoreland’s namesake. In the foyer, a central settee clad in green mohair serves as a sculptural focal point at the entrance.
Artist Darren Waterston was commissioned to create a decorative scheme for the new café, nominated by Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Elements include a foyer mural (Fugue), a panoramic frieze (Arcadia), and three bas relief ceiling medallions. These interior features make art historical references ranging from Japanese screens to Renaissance landscape painting, including the Frick’s famed St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini.
Finishings and features contributed by Selldorf Architects include Nembro Rosato and Breccia Aurora herringbone marble floors and Pietra Bianca di Prun limestone wall cladding. The striking Murano glass pendant lights match those designed for the museum’s new James S. and Barbara N. Reibel Reception Hall.
ABOUT THE NAME
The Frick Collection’s new café takes its name from the private Pullman railway car the Frick family used, beginning in 1911, to travel between their homes, often taking masterpieces from their collection on these journeys of seasonal relocation. They also used the Westmoreland for trips around the United States, including to California, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana. Henry Clay Frick’s wife, Adelaide, and daughter, Helen, continued to use the car until the early 1930s—shortly before the founding of The Frick Collection as a museum, where works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, and other artists have found their permanent home that visitors enjoy today. The car was ultimately dismantled in the 1960s.
At 82 feet long (nearly the length of the museum’s West Gallery), the Westmoreland boasted an intimate, ten-seat dining room, as well as an observation lounge and platform, two staterooms, and other quarters for guests and staff. For meal service, the Fricks employed a private chef, and guests were often invited to the Westmoreland for fine meals prepared in the car’s kitchen and pantry.
Westmoreland is the name of the county outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where museum founder Henry Clay Frick was born. Some private railway cars of the era bore grand mythological names, such as Olympia or Atalanta, while others were named for places of significance to their owners. Frick purchased his car five years after moving to New York City, yet he chose a name that honored his family’s rural origins.
The café honors this tradition of luxury and comfort, while also evoking other historic dining spaces elsewhere in the Frick mansion. Notable among these are the main-floor Dining Room—where Henry Clay Frick hosted two formal dinners per week between October and May—now refurbished and home to portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, John Hoppner, and George Romney that hung in this space during Frick’s lifetime. The other is the Breakfast Room, on the museum’s newly opened second floor, where the Frick family gathered in the morning surrounded by Barbizon School landscape paintings that grace this new gallery.
Image: Westmoreland, the new café at The Frick Collection; Photo: William Jess Laird