There’s a new gourmet restaurant opening in Sacramento, but you can’t eat there.

The Photosynthetic Restaurant is going to be serving gourmet meals to plants at the Crocker Art Museum downtown from April 16 - Jul. 17, giving roses originally planted by the Crockers in the 19th century the well-rounded meals Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats said they deserve.

“In a sense, it’s giving back to the plants that have given such pleasure to us,” he said.

The restaurant “feeds” plants gourmet meals by filtering light through acrylic panels to even out what would otherwise be random light wavelengths. Since plants create their own food through photosynthesis, the light they receive is, in essence, their diet, Keats said.

Colored acrylic panels will hang above the roses outside the historic wing of the Crocker, carefully placed so the plants get the exact menu Keats designed for them.

To view the menu, click here.

“Every day, the plants are getting a three-course meal with morning light, afternoon light and late afternoon light,” Keats said. “It’s based on the position of the sun as it travels across the sky.”

Colored plates set up at preplanned spots allow the sun’s arc across the sky to give the plants different “meals” throughout the day.

Keats, a 39-year-old San Franciscan who was born in New York, said this is his first foray into the restaurant business – for plants or otherwise – but it isn’t his first time working with the botanical world.

Keats has produced travel documentaries for houseplants, showing video from foreign skies on their foliage in darkened theaters. He’s also worked in “pornography for plants” – showing them videos of bees pollinating flowers.

“I am interested in the way in which something that is a typical everyday experience for us affects the plant kingdom,” he said. “It becomes strange when we see another species, something as different as a plant, experiencing something we as humans have done.”

Keats said his goal is to make Crocker visitors reflect on their own cultural habits and customs, taking the world a little bit less for granted.

“This is about gourmet food, but it also more broadly has to do with questions of pleasure and experiences,” Keats said.

But does Keats believe human emotions can be ascribed to plant life?

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I want to initiate a conversation as well as stimulate it. This isn’t a puzzle to be worked out. It is really a starting point for conversation.”

Crocker Art Museum Chief Curator and Assistant Director Scott Shields said Keats thinks about life as no one else does.

“He thinks about things humans do and applies them to insects and flowers,” Shields said, adding that Keats has also choreographed ballets for honeybees. “He examines us at the same time he examines them.”

The Photosynthetic Restaurant ties in with other exhibits the Crocker is showing over the summer.

“He opens first,” Shields said, “then we have an American Impressionist show, then French Impressionists, and then California Impressionists. Both the paintings and the restaurant are so much about the spectrum of color and light.”

The space in front of the historic portion of the Crocker does not require a ticket to be purchased, but Shields said he hopes visitors will come in and see the Crocker’s Impressionist exhibits as a complement to the restaurant.

“It’ll be interesting to see if (the plants) do better or worse,” he said.

Keats said he hopes people will recognize the potential of gourmet sunlight for plants and will open other restaurants for them.

“I’m certainly not the best chef, but I believe I am the first,” he said, adding that the recipe book – co-published by the Crocker Art Museum and Modernism Gallery in San Francisco – will be available during the time the restaurant is active.

The exhibit will run at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O St., from April 16 - July 17. No admission is charged to view the exhibit at the rose garden in front of the historic wing.

Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.