At the 2026 Met Gala, dinner is its own kind of art form. The event designer Raúl Àvila was inspired by the design of Northern Italian gardens, and fittingly incorporated garden elements into the table settings, centerpieces, and chairs for dinner at the Temple of Dendur.
Real fruits - pomegranates, pears, black wine grapes, artichokes, kumquats - and garden flowers make up table centerpieces. The tablecloths are custom - made in a green and off-white stripe pattern, with garden chairs that Àvila designed for the gala.
To enter the dining area, guests walk through an opening in a wall decorated to look like “a slightly romantically decayed wall of an Italian garden,” says Derek McLane, a Tony-winning set designer who’s worked on the Met Gala alongside Àvila since 2023. Known for his work on Broadway, including on Moulin Rouge! The Musical, McLane says he views each gala like a Broadway production staged for one night only. “In a way, each one of these is a different kind of show with its own personality that’s totally different,” he says.
When it comes to the food itself, Olivier Cheng Catering was inspired by the Northern Italian garden concept, highlighting seasonal springtime ingredients and cuisine from the region to bring the garden to the plate. Cheng and his team looked at the menu as three chapters that speak to the decor theme and the exhibition itself: a first course (the garden), a main course (the statue), and a dessert (the silhouette).
“The three chapters really are taking you on this culinary journey that reflects the spirit of the exhibition,” Cheng says.
Dinner service starts with a burrata appetizer with a green tomato salad featuring elderflower, pine, and gooseberries. “The idea is this garden celebrates growth, seasonality, freshness,” and it is a garden that is “shaped, rather than tamed.” Using a tomato water colored by green herbs, the burrata resembles a green tomato one of the first tomatoes in a springtime garden.
The main course is a rack of lamb with morel panna cotta, Parmesan gnocchi, asparagus, carrots, spring peas, and mint. “The rack of lamb is a very strong element, and it’s very sculptural, very statuesque,” Cheng notes.
Of the three courses, the dessert is the most directly connected to the “Costume Art” exhibition, featuring three distinct dishes “that are inspired by three silhouettes from the actual exhibition itself,” Cheng says. These silhouettes were selected by Anna Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The first dessert is a raspberry-infusion chocolate with a red velvet cake and a raspberry chocolate crémeux. It was inspired by an Alexander McQueen dress from the designer’s iconic spring 2001 “Voss” collection. “The filling for that was inspired by the colors of the dress itself, which had red and dark colors,” Cheng says.
The second one is a strawberry pavlova and a passionfruit curd with burgundy amaranth microgreens, inspired by Robert Wun’s bleeding coat from spring 2023. The last one is a white chocolate mocha with a cocoa cake and dark chocolate ganache, inspired by Christian Dior’s bar suit from the spring 2024 collection. Cheng and executive chef Shane O’Neill wanted the food to be not only delicious but fun, whimsical, and visually compelling like edible art.
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