Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall has always been a destination for great music, but our stages aren’t our only attraction. Visitors who choose to explore beyond their seats will be rewarded with a history lesson—and maybe something to please a different sense: their tastebuds. Now home to a historic café that’s been given a new life thanks to a renovation that began in 2019, the space has gone through several iterations that start at the Hall’s conception.

An Original Small Dining Room

The café is original to architect William Burnet Tuthill’s 1891 design for the Hall. Known simply as the “small dining room,” it functioned as a modest banquet hall until 1925. Documentation from this time is sparse: Only a sketch remains of the original design. The challenge, then, for the architects responsible for the latest renovation was to take this limited visual record as a model and reimagine the restrained glamour of that 1891 dining room while adapting it for today’s concertgoers.

From an Art Gallery to the Gallery Bar

The café wasn’t always a café. In 1932, it was converted into the Carnegie Hall Art Gallery. The studios at the Hall, while famous for housing performing artists like Leonard Bernstein and Martha Graham, were also home to a number of visual artists who were able to showcase their work in the exhibition space. Musicians of the New York Philharmonic also held a Painters Club in the Art Gallery between 1949 and 1960.

In 1947, it officially became the Gallery Bar—more martini than museum—and remained a cocktail lounge for decades. (A 1948 advertisement suggests a trip to the Gallery Bar “for that after-concert-snack.”)

The Renovation

During the Hall’s centennial in 1991, the café space received a major renovation in the style of the Wiener Werkstätte, a Viennese modern design workshop—a choice that sought to refresh rather than restore the original architecture.

By contrast, the 2022 renovation aimed to center the history of the original room and recreate not only its Gilded Age aesthetic, but also the sensibility it imparted to its 19th-century visitors.

David Paul Helpern, one of the principal architects to take on the redesign, said of the project, “It must have been astonishing in 1891 to arrive at this remarkable building, erected in a part of the city far beyond where people would have expected to go for a cultural event, and find a music hall that could compete in architectural beauty and acoustical quality with any of Europe’s great venues ... This project has at once been a conscious journey back, revisiting a grand time period in New York’s history for a privileged few, and journey forward, recreating for a broader range of contemporary audiences the ‘awe’ factor that those 1891 concertgoers likely felt.”

A restored ceiling, antique lighting fixtures, recast plaster frames, refurbished columns, and regilded surfaces are just a few of the updates that Helpern Architects made to capture the spirit of this space that’s been part of the Hall from the very beginning. The south wall is adorned with archival photos of artists—an opportunity for contemporary concertgoers to connect with the history of the Hall and the artists who have performed here. Accessibility features that fully meet ADA guidelines were also a key focus of the renovation. The café provides an unexpected moment of intimacy in an otherwise grand and public arena, revealing another facet of the Hall’s history as a meeting place for artists and audiences alike.

Today, the Weill Café is open to the public as a daytime café and espresso bar, where visitors from around the world can experience the splendor of this historic space on their own time. We’re also proud to offer sophisticated Pre-Concert Dining for ticket holders, serving as a delicious, convenient, and delightful prelude to the Carnegie Hall concertgoing experience.

We invite you to indulge in a taste of New York City’s history at our café; whether you are attending a concert at Carnegie Hall or looking for a cup of coffee in Midtown, feel free to stop by the Weill Café nestled on the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue. The daytime café is open Monday through Friday, 10 AM–3 PM. Pre-Concert Dining hours vary; check Resy for available dates and times.

Photography by Chris Lee, Brian T. McNally, and Durston Saylor; selected artifacts courtesy of the Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.