ArtScience Culture Lab & Café

"In Kendall Square, Cafe Artscience (650 Kendall St., Cambridge) has closed after five years. Founder David Edwards plans to open a new restaurant called Senses in its place." - Rachel Leah Blumenthal

"Cafe Artscience will close at the end of service on Saturday, December 21, after five years of operation — and evolution — at 650 Kendall St. in East Cambridge. Founder David Edwards announced the news to customers in an email newsletter on December 20, also giving a hint of what’s to come. Samdo, who was beverage director and partner at Artscience at the time of his death from liver cancer in January 2019, was a beloved fixture in the beverage industry in Boston (and beyond). Earlier in his career, he worked for Adams at her downtown restaurant Trade. In Artscience’s five-year span, it went through several different eras along with major staffing changes, especially in 2017, when its name changed to Artscience Culture Lab and Cafe. That summer, executive chef Brandon Baltzley departed to focus on his pop-up dinner series on the Cape, the Buffalo Jump, which is now a permanent restaurant. He had replaced Artscience’s opening chef Patrick Campbell, who went on to open the Stones Common House in Stoneham. Mid-2017 also saw the departure of opening partner and cocktail wizard Todd Maul (a Clio alum), who has consulted on various projects since then. Carolina Curtin (an alum of Haley Henry and Menton) came onboard as chef de cuisine at the time, but departed in 2018; these days, she’s at Yellow Door Taqueria, which is expanding from Dorchester to the South End. Since mid-2018, chef Benjamin Lacy has been at the helm of the Artscience kitchen; he’s an alum of Cambridge’s now-closed En Boca and Ten Tables, among other restaurants. Throughout the changes, the food hovered in the fine-dining arena, showcasing bits of Edwards’ work as an inventor and scientist but without hitting diners over the head with modernist cuisine, aside from hints like Edwards’ “WikiPearls” of foie gras or “flavor clouds” from “Le Whaf” at the bar." - Rachel Leah Blumenthal

"The Pika was one of the first cocktails that beloved late bar manager Tenzin Samdo made for Artscience. It’s a delicious blend of scotch, ginger, clarified lemon, honey, and St. Germain, flavored with alpine herbs that can be found in its namesake’s natural habitat. The elaborate garnish — a lychee foam topped with cayenne, turmeric, lavender, coconut, basil, and a rice paper hummingbird — is all part of the experience, allowing the drinker to get a slightly different aroma and flavor depending on what part of the bowl from which they sip." - Katie Faust Stryjewski

"One day, the United Nations is going to select a group of elite scientists, train them for space travel, and send them to farthest reaches of the universe, where they’ll conduct a series of experiments in hopes of creating bionic humans who will be able to leap over tall buildings, read an unabridged copy of Moby Dick in 10 minutes, and always remember to charge their phones overnight. Assuming that spaceship will have a restaurant, it’s going to look a lot like ArtScience in Kendall Square. This place calls itself a food laboratory, serving up supposedly experimental French-ish stuff in a space that feels very much like a Kendall Square pharma lab. The food itself is pretty mediocre (and from what we can tell, not very experimental) but the cocktails are outstanding and worth a trip on their own - whimsical, flavorful drinks you’ll want to take a picture of even if you’re not the type of person who takes pictures of food. We highly recommend the pikka, a mix of scotch, alpine herbs, lychee foam, and other good stuff that is served in a bowl." - Dan Secatore

"Chef Benjamin Lacy’s potato gnocchi with miso parmesan and summer black truffle at Cafe ArtScience." - Rachel Leah Blumenthal