Mina Stone Explains How her New All-Day Cafe Came to Life

Even on the gloomiest winter afternoon, Mina’s oversized windows beam light over tables dotted with gold-rimmed plates of crusty bread and cloud-like whipped feta. The rest of MoMA PS1 may be all brick and concrete—after all, the contemporary art museum in Queens, NY was once an elementary school —but Mina’s, a Greek-inspired restaurant that opened in November, is a mint-and-magenta oasis within its walls.

Like Flora Bar (below the Met Breur on the Upper East Side) and Otium (next to The Broad in downtown L.A.), Mina’s is the latest museum restaurant to assert itself as a dining destination in its own right—no museum admission required. There are no pre-wrapped egg salad sandwiches here. Instead, there’s a Mediterranean-accented menu from Mina Stone, who has transitioned to feeding art lovers after years of working as a personal in-studio chef for the artist Urs Fischer and art dealer Gavin Brown. (Stone’s 2015 cookbook, Cooking for Artists, has found a rabid fan base among art and food lovers alike.)

“I'm out of my safe world of people who have eaten my food before,” Stone says with a laugh. “That’s what’s so exciting about the museum: I’m opened up to the world—the young, old, tourists, New Yorkers, whoever it might be.”

A proudly self-described “home cook,” Stone says she never planned on opening a restaurant of her own. But when she was approached by Peter Eleey, MoMA PS1’s chief curator, to take over the cafe previously occupied by M. Wells Dinette, the idea stuck. Stone’s husband, artist Alex Eagleton, worked with designer Isobel Herbold to channel their shared Greek heritage without relying on taverna kitsch, instead creating a “visually calm respite” from the heavy themes explored in the surrounding classroom-sized galleries.

The result is a museum cafe born of the all-day café era, serving up obligatory (and welcome) glasses of natural wine alongside Stone’s signature comfort food: lentil soup jolted with lemon juice, gooey slabs of tahini babka, white anchovies swimming in very good olive oil, and high-octane ouzo, all delivered by waiters with art school haircuts in gothic gingham track pants (a gift from Stone’s fashion school friend, womenswear designer Adam Selman.) Here, Stone and Eagleton share the origins of the Greek-ish elements that give Mina’s its distinct sense of place.

It’s all about the snacks

Stone: Our small plates are based on mezzetaki, which is something you do in the late afternoon in Greece—you have some ouzo and sit on the beach, and the kitchen brings you out these little snacks with toothpicks. We have pickled cucumbers and carrots, whipped feta, muhammara, white anchovies, Greek sausage, and olives with cracked coriander. The Greek sausage we get from a butcher in Astoria who makes them all on-site. Alex and I go to Astoria all the time because there’s a supermarket called Titan that has all the delicious Greek feta—it’s the Greek megastore of New York. This butcher shop has lambs hanging in the window; it’s one of the butcher shops Americans would be pretty freaked out by.