The Great Cafés: Café Sabarsky, The Neue Galerie, New York City

I’m not sure that fine art actually needs coffee. But fine coffee — accompanied by conversation, of course, with someone you care for — benefits mightily from the prospect of viewing art later in the day.

Yet you seldom have the opportunity to see one of the very great paintings of the last 150 years - a world-famous work that richly deserves its reputation and recently sold at well over $100 million dollars - for only slightly more than the price of that fine cup of coffee. Or maybe, if you're feeling particularly profligate, the coffee and a slice of Viennese chocolate torte, rich with sweet schlag (whipped cream).

It goes without saying that any café where this takes place would be well in the running to be called a great one. At the Café Sabarsky, located in the Neue Galerie at 86th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City, you can have just such an experience.

The Neue Galerie is housed in a striking Beaux-Arts mansion that was built in 1914 for a prominent New York industrialist, William Starr Miller, and occupied later by Cornelius Vanderbilt III and his wife Grace Vanderbilt. More spiffy than the Vanderbilts you cannot get. A reporter for The Dramatic Mirror, the leading American theatrical trade journal of the time, sniffed that "the Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks."

It had been so for quite a while. In 1883, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, the wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt (Cornelius III's uncle), was putting the finishing touches on a mansion the couple had built at the corner of 5th Avenue and 52nd Street. This was not a fixer-upper. Its design, by the renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt, was based on that of the Chateau de Blois in France. It was simply the grandest of the new grand edifices being built on Fifth Avenue at the time. Alva wanted to have a commemorative ball for her friends, most of whom were in the upper echelon of New York City society. She intended the event to cast a dark shadow over the Patriarch's Ball, a yearly celebration held for only the right sort of people by Ward McCallister and Mrs. Caroline Astor. McCallister and Mrs. Astor had been for years the doyens of upper-crust New York.

Article Author: Terence Clarke

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts. His latest novel is A Kiss For Señor Guevara.

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