New York City’s Lower East Side is home to Preserve24, a beautiful new two-story art installation functioning as a 5,000 square foot restaurant, designed by San Francisco artist and part owner Brian Goggin. Created with found and recycled materials, this establishment took a year and a half to create and is fashioned after an “expedition society headquarters.” By early next year, for their ICE Project, Goggin and a team plan to “venture onto the Greenland ice sheet, dig into the glacier, extract an enormous, strikingly beautiful, monolith of basal ice, and preserve and present it in a sculptural reliquary for rare public viewing.” With Chef John Parlatore at the helm, Preserve24 officially opens Thursday May 16, 2013 (menu).
Preserve24 is not just another lower East Side café, a bar or restaurant; it’s an immersive, multi-disciplinary art installation of an expedition society headquarters responsible for launching an art expedition to Greenland to carve-out, by hand, and extract from an iceberg, transport and preserve an ancient piece of glacial ice for future generations in a sculptural freezer. It’s a social club built out of up-cycled materials from boats to instruments. The stuff people would cast aside as they venture deeper on their expedition. It’s a sitting room with creative local, sustainable food and warm atmosphere where artistic, ambitious ideas are nurtured and where patrons become participants in the Preserve24 Expedition Society designed by Artist Brian Goggin, and built with his collaborator Artist Peter Cole, Senior Project Manager Phil Hayes and a team of artists and craftspeople.
Photos:
Gothamist –“Inside Preserve24, A New LES Restaurant Within An Art Installation”
The New York Times Diner’s Journal – “Preserve24, Where Food, Exploration and Fantasy Meet”
Grub Street New York — “First Look at Preserve24, a LES Restaurant That’s Also an Art Installation”
Thrillist — “This is the only bar in NY that will have a 4000lb iceberg inside it”
photo by Tod Seelie / Sucka Pants via Gothamist
photos by Andrew Zimmer for Thrillist