What’s Happening: An all-star team has unveiled a seafood restaurant in New York City’s Starrett-Lehigh building that’s more than just another dining destination—it’s a deep dive into Black art and culinary traditions.

The Download: At Hav & Mar, Black creativity is on the menu. Opening his first New York City restaurant in seven years, chef Marcus Samuelsson picked a 5,000-square-foot expanse in one of Chelsea’s most famous buildings, the 1931 polygonal landmark known as Starrett-Lehigh. “Our hope,” Samuelsson said in a statement announcing the opening, “is that Hav & Mar is a reflection of Black joy and excellence.”

Designed by Montreal firm Atelier Zébulon Perron, Hav & Mar is named after the Swedish word for “ocean” and the Amharic word for “honey.” Samuelsson assembled a distinguished culinary team to join him: executive chef Rose Noël, who comes from DC’s Maialino Mare; head baker Farheen Jafarey, fresh from Samuelsson’s famed Red Rooster in Harlem; and the Wythe Hotel’s Rafa Garcia Febles to oversee a beverage program highlighting female producers of color.

The team’s multicultural background ranges from Ethiopian and Haitian to Pakistani and Swedish, a diversity that shows up on the seafood-focused menu, from dawa dawa seared bass and corn-wrapped snapper to berbere-cured salmon with mustard seed caviar. The Nordic spirit Aquavit is infused in-house with ingredients such as yuzu, smoked pineapple, chili pepper, and others.

More than a celebration of culinary traditions, Hav & Mar is a platform for Black art. For that, Samuelsson turned to Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden. But perhaps nobody has been involved more deeply in the project than artist Derrick Adams, who devised a series of large-scale works. “We started from a historical space, sending images back and forth of documentation of Black people in factories shelling crabs for cans of crab meat, and talking about oyster culture in New York,” he says.

That led to deeper research into African and Haitian mermaid mythologies that predated Atlantic slave trade narratives. “They were more connected to just the mystery, the freedom of fantasy, and their freedom of looking at Blackness in a particular way that is not defined by anything other than itself,” Adams says.

Playing on that theme, Adams’s We Are from the Water, too is defined by seven-foot mermaid sculptures whose presence turns the restaurant into a metaphorical body of water. Adams explored his own fabric collection for bolts from which he crafted their scales. “I started to think about the mermaid almost as a beacon,” he says, “something that was so mystical and opulent that it can also be used as a light to draw people in, to set a tone and a mood for the restaurant that’s not just about service, it’s about inspiration.”

Adams is having quite a moment: “I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You,” a show of cinematic, large-scale paintings, is running at the Flag Foundation through March 11. The expansive multi-media installation, This City is My Refuge, is on display as part of the Art at Amtrak series in the upper-level main rotunda of Manhattan’s Penn Station, departing at the end of the summer.

Both are worth checking out, though they won’t offer the chance to contemplate his work while sipping on a rum-based Banana Leaf cocktail with cooked banana cordial, rancio sec wine, nutmeg, and palo santo. Thankfully, there’s Hav & Mar, ready to, as Adams puts it, “welcome in visual thinkers and creative minds, and serve as a meeting ground for engagement and communion, like a gallery.” But with corn husk chocolate pudding.

In Their Own Words: “As a Black artist, sometimes we’re drawn to create commentary and response to something else but naturally, that’s not my instinctual nature of making art,” Adams says. “People should have the freedom of looking at an image of a mermaid who happens to be Black without comparing it to a mermaid that is white. I hope I can contribute an alternative way of looking at Blackness in a way that’s fortifying and empowering and not comparative.”

Surface Says: As former tenants of the Starrett-Lehigh, we can only wish Hav & Mar was part of our world.

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Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto is many things: a fable of a cursed court jester; an evisceration of toxic masculinity; an opera Verdi considered revolutionary in form, even as his contemporaries condemned the dark work as satanic. That opinion gradually shifted towards adoration, eventually winning praise even from modernist maestros like Igor Stravinsky.

Over the weekend, Switzerland’s Theater Basel revealed what can be made of Rigoletto today. The new staging boasts direction by Vincent Huguet and stars Swiss soprano Regula Mühlemann in her debut as the jester’s doomed daughter, Gilda. But its biggest draw might be Huguet’s enlisting of renowned interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch, whose work is generally as sleek as it is chic, to envision the sets. It’s his first adventure in theatrical scenography. “When he proposed to me this opportunity,” Yovanovitch tells Surface, “I felt like a kid in a playground. Imagining the scenography for this story was an incredibly exciting challenge.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a work with ever-shifting moral compasses, Yovanovitch’s sets are quite simple, at least at first glance. But then, as the power balance shifts and the plot launches into motion, so do the set’s graceful curves. What once feels intimate becomes voyeuristic, claustrophobic, and unstable. “All the characters are made endearing by their psychological complexity, by the alliance in each of them of the odious and the sensitive, of submission and freedom,” he says. “This makes it remarkably contemporary and I wanted the physical set to reflect that aspect of the storyline.” We say bravo.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of cult design magazine Nest, which published 26 issues of radical interiors from 1997 until it closed shop in 2004. From content—its purview ran less towards luxury and more toward features on congressional nuclear bunkers and barbed-wire beds—to radical layouts embracing scratch-off covers and zipped plastic lines, Nest was worthy of the obsession it garnered. It’s now the muse for “Raising the Ceiling by Lowering the Floor” (through Feb. 18), an eye-tickling solo show of paintings by Mark Joshua Epstein at Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York.

Epstein, a 2023 Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, eschews both direct appropriation and traditional abstraction. Layering panels with fiberglass and resin in flamboyant colors and scrumptious curves, he winks both at medieval Hebrew paperwork and 20th-century op art. His brushstrokes push the limits of what the work may contain—a fitting tribute to the fearless exploration of his print inspiration.

Northern California’s redwood forests are renowned for their beauty, so it makes sense that Studio Plow sought to pay homage to the landscape in a jewelbox residence nestled among the foliage of Sonoma County. The studio’s chief creative officer Brit Epperson and designer Avery Smith took the lead on transforming a 1950s-era home into a retreat brimming with pieces emblematic of contemporary design, from a quartz chandelier to a quintessential Gio Ponti mirror. Below, we take a closer look.

What stands out to you the most? When you’re in the home, it feels like you’re floating in the trees. The increased connections with nature help tie the home to its surroundings and extend the living and entertaining spaces. The open floor plan makes it great for entertaining despite its modest size.

Favorite detail? We love the Christopher Boots uncut quartz crystal light fixture as a nod to the client’s collection of crystals. In the kitchen, we rethought the entire layout with custom millwork and appliances that hide in the cabinetry with the exception, of course, of the La Cornue range. It’s a showpiece that introduces the story of the client’s French pastry training.

A welcome distraction? Tarot readings. Our client does these incredible readings and that was a welcome, yet insightful distraction during the project.

We’ve seen our fair share of science-gone-amok flicks (Frankenstein, Jurassic Park) and murderous doll slashers (Child’s Play, The Conjuring), but never something that mashes those two genres together quite like the Gerard Johnstone–directed M3gan, the sci-fi horror whose titular vengeful doll has become an overnight pop culture sensation.

The uncanny spectacle of her character—an impeccably dressed, four-foot-tall robot girl whose name is short for Model 3 Generative Android—is everywhere. An army of M3gans in drag mimicked the doll’s noodling dance moves atop the Empire State Building before going viral on TikTok; some joined star Alison Williams on her press junket.

The film tackles timely topics of parental care and the rise of AI, but screenwriter Akela Cooper—who penned the script five years ago—insists it wasn’t intentional. The idea arose when Judson Scott, an executive at production company Atomic Monster, was browsing an American Doll store and imagined one killing people. They already produced Annabelle and its sequel, however, and sought a fresher idea, so the AI narrative came naturally. “It’s more prescient than we thought,” Cooper says. “We were thinking about, could you have Alexa babysit your child if you took that and put it in the body of a robot?”

Since founding Dinosaur Designs more than 30 years ago, designers and artists Louise Olsen and Stephen Ormandy have created a mini-art movement synonymous with luxury. Creating jewelry and homewares from resin and precious metals, their unique pieces are characterized by a warmth and tactility only possible by making each piece by hand in their studio.

Surface Says: Dinosaur Designs has created a distinctly punchy and colorful point of view with its statement-making fashion and home accessories.

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Lorraine Louie’s stylishly surreal book covers embodied an ‘80s look and feel.

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