Below average, below ground museum café. I could blame the architects of the new unit, who stuck this downstairs in the back with a kind of soulless seating floor and a very awkward cafeteria-style system. But the food direction is also odd, with an order-with-numbers system where you have to wait for it if you're going outside to eat (which requires schlepping your food up some massive stairs and around two turns just to get to the outside area) but for which they'll deliver if you're in the dismal downstairs. It's a huge missed opportunity; the largely empty (perhaps to keep it aesthetically pleasing) spot for the bookstore/gift shop, obviously positioned on the first floor to get more traffic, is adjacent to the outside seating area and would have been a far better choice for the café.
The counter service was a strange mix of hovering and inattentive.
As for the food, it's a theoretically nice set of high-end salads with no hot options (the hot stuff we ordered was just tepid), but is thrown together, given ingredients and pricing. The salmon-spinach salad, for example, was just baby spinach with sort of indifferent slices of salmon (not chopped for better coverage for flavor) tucked at random inside; the caesar salad was about as plain as you could imagine, and the special "Buddha Bowl", which a tasty original, was a pretty small portion for double digit pricing.
It's adequate but it's not the kind of café to make you say "oh, let's meet for lunch at the Clark!", and without good inside seating that takes advantage of the beautiful view, adjacent to that view, it's just a quick refueling stop. read more