Let the good times zigzag.

Don't listen to all the reports of economic doom and gloom. The good times are here again! How do we know? Because insane condo parties have returned.

Once a staple of the bubble, over-the-top parties tapered off when matters grew more pressing for developers than whether to serve white Champagne or rosé. You could almost hear the madness coming to a head when John Legend performed at an opening in the Financial District and Seal was doing a gig at another project uptown. On the same night. The Times called it a real estate battle of the bands.

With units disappearing and prices creeping up from not-so lows, we'll go ahead and say it: the housing market, at least in New York, is back. As if we needed a clearer indication of that, consider the opening party for the Mercedes House.

First off, consider the Mercedes House itself. A high-profile architect, Enrique Norten, built an unusually shaped building that zigzags up from the Hudson. There is a Mercedes dealership on the ground floor. The building, the first major Manhattan project by David and Jed Walentas' Two Trees Development, is named after this dealership. Let us repeat. The building is called the Mercedes House. The building is called the Mercedes House.

If that were  not enough, the opening party will be hosted by former Nickelodeon darling Nick Cannon. Our favorite cabaretist and star spawn Alexa Ray Joel will be there, along with Rev. Run of Run DMC fame. Oh, and the chairman and the CEO of Mercedes. The food is by the chef at Danny Meyer's Modern, Gabriel Kreuther. A surprise musical guest is promised. Could it be Mr. Cannon's inimitable wife, Mariah Carey?

Pass the Champagne, would you?

Update: A point of clarification—the party is being hosted by Mercedes-Benz at their dealership, not by Two Trees at the condos. Still, we think the party, which is next Tuesday, speaks for itself.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Stylish business attire? I began to imagine what Van Gogh, Mondrian or Pollock would look like dressed in Armani suits and Turnbull and Asser shirts, sitting at one of the restaurant's brown leather horseshoe banquettes, discussing life and art over tuna tartare scallops and orange-dusted lamb served under silver domes. On second thought, perhaps they'd prefer a steak in the barroom? 

The new, expanded MoMA now has two restaurants, the Modern and Cafe 2. (Dining, along with shopping, seems to have become as integral a part of museum-going these days as looking at art.) The museum's café/bar is more casual, serving fashionable "small plates"; the Modern's formal dining room has a prix-fixe menu at a patron's price of $74. Both restaurants are run by Danny Meyer, whose empire includes Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, and both share the same kitchen under Alsatian chef Gabriel Kreuther, who was formerly at Atelier in the Ritz Carlton.

To get to the main restaurant, you walk through the barroom, with its long, white marble bar and an entire back wall covered by a misty Thomas Demand photograph of a forest. I passed a table where a man wore his hair in a bun, held in place with two ivory chopsticks-stylish, hip-and entered the Modern's formal dining room, which is behind an opaque glass wall. It's airy and elegant, done in a subdued palette of brown, gray and white. Enormous windows look out onto the sculpture garden, where a Calder provides a splash of red that pulls the whole picture together.

Mr. Kreuther's menu fits well into this cool, unfussy setting. His food is original and scrupulously innovative: multifaceted dishes that demand your attention, beginning with an array of colorful "amuses bouches" sent from the kitchen when you sit down-miniature gougère with caviar, Arctic char tartare, yellow chèvre mousse, morel mushroom "foam," asparagus vichyssoise, meyer lemon scallop.

Among the appetizers, the buckwheat soup was outstanding, a creamy concoction laced with soy sprouts and a poached egg floating in the center. The sweet-pea soup was wonderful, too, with a texture like satin, poured over a mound of barley and topped with crème fraîche. A slab of sautéed foie gras came with a rich, complex sauce made with Trappist ale, and juicy langoustines wrapped in bacon were matched with a spicy yogurt dressing and cardamom oil. The ubiquitous tuna tartare took on new life in Mr. Kreuther's hands, cut into small cubes with scallops and combined with American caviar on thin circles of cucumber.

But I found some of Mr. Kreuther's other dishes fussy and overcomplicated, reading better than they tasted, and not as exciting as his cooking at Atelier. The trouble has to do with inconsistency in the kitchen. Escargots in a "gateau" made with potatoes, scallions and ginger-flavored parsley jus sounded great, but the potatoes were undercooked and the combination was disappointingly wan. So was a salad of chopped celery root and oysters, formed into a wedge with almond cream and spread with American caviar. Turbot, perfectly poached in buttermilk, didn't get any help from a tasteless clove mousseline with sea urchin. The chicken trio-mousse sausage, poached leg and sautéed breast stuffed with herbs-was served with morels that had a good earthy taste, but the dish as a whole didn't sparkle.

And yet I've never had a better piece of buffalo tenderloin, which was poached in spiced cabernet and cut like butter. A filet of cod covered with a crust made of thin scales of chorizo was matched with a purée of white coco beans and harissa oil-another brilliant dish. The spice-crusted sturgeon was no less stellar, braised in pink grapefruit juice with chunks of grapefruit and served with caramelized endive. Roast lobster was lovely, served in a signature Kreuther herb broth with asparagus and salsify.

Pastry chef Marc Aumont's desserts include a superb lemon millefeuille made with paper-thin layers of crisp pastry stuffed with papaya, mango, blood orange and passion fruit, as well as a knockout chocolate soufflé. There's also a caramel parfait enlivened with mango marmalade and a 10-flavor sorbet (get all 10 and go to the head of the class) and buttermilk panna cotta with pomegranate sorbet, pineapple and aged balsamic vinegar.

Next, on to the barroom: I loved it. It's fun. Because there was a short wait for the table, our waiter gave us a free Alsatian tarte flambé, made with gruyère, bacon and onion on a thin crust, which we ate by the bar. Astonishingly, the room didn't seem at all noisy; despite the crowd and the hard surfaces, the acoustics are great. Mr. Kreuther's bar menu puts some of his less adventurous customers to the test. Dishes such as baekoffe of lamb, conch and tripe and eel rillettes with turnips and horseradish sauce would've been enjoyable if they hadn't been so bland. Twin oysters arrived on a green glass dish that looked like a spa eye mask, overwhelmed by a thick layer of salty American caviar. Goat cheese wrapped in bacon-a conceit I didn't get-was served with an otherwise perfectly good herb salad. And chunks of lobster were overkill in a pleasant artichoke soup.

My favorite dish was made with Serrano ham topped with a poached egg and served with cockles and a garlic-almond sauce. This Spanish-inspired combination was pure heaven: When you put a fork into the egg, the yolk commingled with the sauce and the saline taste of the cockles. Diver scallops coated with poppy seeds were also terrific, as was a melting, slow-poached filet of wild salmon in a horseradish crust, served with cabbage and Riesling.

Despite the ups and downs of the food, both MoMA restaurants are a treat to be in; they're also overwhelmingly popular, as the long wait for a table testifies. Recently, I ran into a friend and asked her what she thought of the new MoMA. Without missing a beat, she replied: "The barroom was more fun than the main restaurant, but both were good." I didn't ask what she thought of the museum.

From 53rd Street, you approach the Modern via a funhouse-like curving-glass passageway that is backlit by bright white bulbs-it could really give you the creeps if it weren't so short. The passageway deposits you into a large, loud bar area, made even louder by the plangent bass-driven jazz emanating from all corners. At the front of the room is a massive white marble bar, all 46 feet of it illuminated from below. At 7 p.m., the room was busier than a Bosch triptych, crowded with a farrago of post-museum-goers, happy-hour devotees and curiosity seekers like me.

The only objet d'art in sight was-now take a deep breath-a bowling-alley-size photograph of a paper sculpture of a forest. You'll have to see it for yourself. Called Clearing, it's by a German artist named Thomas Demand. At first I thought it strange that the bar and restaurant were not festooned with de Koonings, Dalís and Man Rays, but it became clear that the owners wanted to create a dining experience that was harmonious with the museum without being overwhelmed by it. Or, as executive chef Gabriel Kreuther recently remarked of the restaurant, "It's in a museum and not in a museum."

As for the "bar" food, don't expect chicken wings and fried mozzarella sticks. Along with your chardonnay, you can have anything from specialties like smoked eel rillettes (it's similar to a pâté-$11) to foie gras with toasted country bread ($17) to lamb loin with fennel confit ($14) and potato-and-marrow cassolette with smoked beef tongue ($11).

From my standing-room-only perch at the noisy bar, it was a little difficult to ask patrons what they thought of the place, but I did my best.

"What do you think of the place?" I inquired of two middle-aged ladies from Murray Hill who were sitting at the bar, one wearing a thick cable-knit sweater, the other in a red turtleneck. They were splitting a crab salad.

"Lovely place, a little dark-very nice people," said the first. "Do you think it will always be this busy?"

"Gee, I don't know-of course, this is a holiday weekend," I said.

"We're not really bar-goers. We're not really big museum-goers either," chimed in her companion. "But we had to see this. I think we'll come back for dinner."

"How about the museum?"

"Maybe when it gets warmer," she replied.

Behind a large glass partition in the back of the room is the much-anticipated restaurant, the Modern, which opened to the public on Feb. 7. In keeping with the Bauhaus tradition, the room is open, airy and cool: form following function at the highest level. I had invited a friend and frequent cohort on dining expeditions, Dominique Simon, who is a wine importer. We were seated in a deep horseshoe banquette that faced the cynosure of the complex, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. "Great seats," I said. "If your date is less than titillating, you can always commune with Henry Moore."

While it appears that there are as many staff members as there are customers at the Modern, it is a notably unfussy place. The service is exacting, but amiable and self-assured-I even had a brief conversation about zydeco music with one of the sommeliers.

Danny Meyer, president of the Union Square Hospitality Group, which runs all of the museum's restaurants, has spared no expense with the Modern's dining room: Egyptian cotton napery, elegant German-designed flatware and Spiegelau stemware. Mr. Meyer's trademark, which he pioneered with his enduringly successful Union Square Café, is to create first-rate, fancy restaurants with superb food and service-and then subtract the fancy.

"My hardest job right now is to get everybody to loosen up," he said as he stopped by our table, wearing a plaid suit, blue shirt and an expression of edgy vigilance. "Sometimes I just want to say to them, 'Chill out!'" His credo, he has said many times, is to create a beautiful space, serve excellent food and offer warm hospitality-then let it fly.

"That's not always an easy thing," he said.

Mr. Meyer's company, which owns, among other ventures, Tabla, Gramercy Tavern and Blue Smoke, runs all of the dining venues in the museum, including a large cafeteria-style facility on the second floor, a dessert parlor on the fifth and an employee cafeteria, also on the second floor.

Manning the stoves at the Modern is the soft-spoken Gabriel Kreuther, the Alsace-born wizard who previously served as chef of Atelier, the formal dining room in the Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park. His menu is intellectual and innovative; he has pulled no punches because the restaurant is in a museum. The three-course prix-fixe dinner is $74; with a cheese course, it's $88. The international wine list has a little for every taste, and you don't have to be a Matisse collector to find choices in your price range.

On the current menu are dishes like sautéed skate in a pimiento nâge and fricassée of leeks, orange-dusted loin of lamb and a potato cake with escargot, scallions and gingered parsley jus. I started with sweet langoustines wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon along with spicy yogurt and cardamom oil, while Dominique opted for a dish that he liked so much when he was there last that he ordered it again: sweet-pea soup with barley, comté cheese and whipped cream. Two pleasing main courses were buttermilk-poached turbot with clove sauce, cauliflower and sea urchin, and a pair of faintly gamy wild boar chops with sauerkraut and a potato terrine.

When we took our leave at 9:30 p.m., the bar was still fairly lively; it stays open until 11:30 p.m. from Monday through Saturday.

I returned the next day to check out Cafe 2 and the dessert spot, both of which are accessible only to museum patrons who have paid the $20 admission fee.

It was shortly after noon, and the cafeteria was so packed you'd think they were giving away original Warhol soup cans with every bowl of clam chowder. So far, Cafe 2 has been serving more than 1,000 people a day. The large, spare, glassed-in dining hall could well be the cafeteria of an affluent suburban high school. Sparkling clean. Efficient. Cheerful. Rows of long pine tables spilling over with families, artsy types (the ones with berets), T-shirted teens, foreigners and more crumpled ski jackets than the base lodge at Vail.

Technically speaking, this is not a cafeteria. In single file, diners inspect the day's selections and questions about the food are answered by "menu consultants" (a.k.a. cashiers); servers then deliver the dishes to the table. The Italian-style menu revolves around pastas, panini, pizza, cheeses, salads and soups in the $5-to-$12 range.

My final stop was the Terrace 5, a smaller (60 seats) full-service café that offers, in addition to sandwiches and salads, 15 types of homemade and imported chocolates, as well as desserts like pistachio cake with hazelnut praline and cream ($7). Small savory plates, like Mediterranean chicken salad and seared yellow fin tuna, are in the $10-to-$16 range. This is one of the few such cafés I have seen that recommends wines with your desserts. A perfect match to the pistachio cake, the menu suggests, is a Ramos Pinto 20-year-old Tawny Port ($17).

It's a cute space, with a small anodized aluminum bar and a spectacular 40-seat outdoor terrace that floats over the sculpture garden. I could just imagine a June afternoon on the terrace, sipping Champagne and popping chocolate truffles.

On my way out, I checked in one last time at the Pamplona scene in Cafe 2.

"How long you been waiting?" I asked a fellow in the middle of the line.

"Actually, it's moving pretty fast-not as bad as it looks," he said, rocking his dozing toddler.

I haven't been to the restaurants in the Louvre in Paris, the Tate in London or the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but I'm certain that MoMA more than holds its own. Already, Mr. Meyer's ambitious projects have sparked some discussion about the synergies between art and food, and how the connection between the visual and the gustatory has taken on new meaning.

I was going to pose this question to Mr. Meyer, but then I changed my mind; he would have laughed at me. Instead I asked, "When the smoke clears, who do you think will come to this restaurant? Art types? Foodies? Tourists?"

"You know," he replied, rubbing his weary eyes, "so far we've had punk rockers, we've had people in suits, we've had Howard Stern-you name it. And that's the way it should be."