Paul Schimmel

* Chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gallery Preview: My favorite weekend begins on Friday, when I spend the day very often visiting galleries. On Friday and Saturday nights the new shows are usually opening, so I go during the day and get a preview at Bergamot Station or the La Brea area or over to Wilshire or West Hollywood. Often I try to go with a collector or a museum trustee and share my enthusiasm with them. The hard part is you have to fight your way home with the traffic, but that’s the price you pay.

To Market, to Market: Saturday morning, if we get up really early, me and the two kids--Max, 10, and Dean, 8--we’ll go downtown to the flower market and then to the Empress Pavilion for breakfast. If we don’t go downtown, we’ll go to the farmers market at Pasadena High School, and that’s fun because there are a lot of kids from my children’s school and they see people they know. We also sometimes go over to Valley Boulevard in Alhambra, where there is an enormous supermarket and shopping area with about 15 different types of Chinese restaurants.

Valley Haunt: Almost every Saturday night we have a standing dinner date with [artists] Nancy Rubins and Chris Burden. We meet at a place in Northridge, a Japanese restaurant called Kabuki on Reseda Boulevard. They live in Topanga and we live in Altadena, so believe it or not, that’s about halfway. It’s an immensely popular place. They don’t take reservations, and you’ll have to wait 30 minutes or an hour, even at 6 p.m. But the food is fabulous.

Mountain to Sea: We sometimes go bicycling--mountain biking--in the San Gabriel National Forest near JPL. There are some great bike paths up there, and we’ll take a little picnic. We usually do that in the winter when it’s cooler. In the summer, we’ll go to Laguna to Crystal Cove and go Boogie-boarding and swimming down there. Sometimes I’ll go visit my old museum--the Newport Harbor Art Museum, now the Orange County Museum of Art--and see what’s happening there.