MoMA Café 2
“Chicken Panini was good as well but once I tasted the grits I was in heaven.”
“Our table got the antipasti meatballs, romaine salad with chicken, mushroom tart, polenta, the baked pennette, and the chocolate chip cookies.”
“I enjoyed the rigatoni with sausage, and the cauliflower soup as a dip for everyone's bread.”
MoMA Café 2
Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
Bike Parking: Yes
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Good for Kids: Yes
Good for Groups: Yes
Waiter Service: Yes
Price range.
$$ Price range $11-30
8 reviews
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We are a big fan for their cold pumpkin squash soup. I love it!!! Since my bf has MOMA membership. We decided to just come whenever we can to just get their soup. Oh Yay.
Museum cafes have upped their game nowadays.
Passing by the chef counter and open kitchen on the way to my table overlooking 51st St, fresh vegetables, marinating meats, homemade focaccia and other staples indicative of a culinary pantry, lulled my senses into a hypnotic comfort.
Indeed the space at the MOMAs second floor cafe, feels like a boutique spa lobby.
The simple menu doesnt quiet command the prices, but I justified it as a little luxury tax. The space is calm and the food is good. Meat and cheese plates start at $18, while single vegetable sides like beets, asparagus and carrots run $9, your cheapest option. Panini's and flatbreads were around $14, as were the salads, which I chose, with added chicken for $6. The salad came with mixed greens, ramps and diced asparagus and was dressed in an onion vinaigrette. The chicken was perfectly tender and I felt truly vibrant after its consumption but I still wouldn't say it was worth a $20 price tag without tax.
No one would, and it's a little insulting. If you think of it like hotel room service it's still painful.
$20 for a salad? And not that I wanted them, but it didn't even have croutons.
Decrescendo muffled trumpet.
The food at cafe MOMA tastes good and is fresh, but $28 for a salad with chicken and coke, even after my employee discount, was just off the chain insane.
Don't go too hungry. Bring lots of cash.
After exploring a good part of the MoMa, you're ready for sustenance, but not ready to leave the premises, so you decide to grab a bite. It happens, eating at museums, that is. It is as unavoidable as eating in amusement parks. Once we located the cafe, we were seated in one of the communal tables, which were rather cramped.
We just shared a chicken panini and an order of meatballs. The panini had some nice grill marks. The bread was nice and fluffy, but the chicken needed flavor. It also came with some cauliflower florets and olives, which I appreciate, but too bad I don't like olives.
The meatballs, on the other hand, were excellent. They were juicy and seasoned well. The three meatballs were covered in marinara sauce and parmesan cheese, topped with some microgreens, and plated with a small piece of focaccia, which was pretty buttery and moist.
I feel a little conflicted, because the meatballs were possibly the best museum food I have ever had. However, prices here are steep, like $15 kale salad steep. But if I had to eat at a museum, I think this cafe would be a good way to go. Overall, I'd say it's a 7/10. But the selection is better than that of most museums, and the meatballs were two thumbs up, so I'll round it up to a 4/5.
MoMA Cafe is located in a section on the 2nd floor of the Museum of Modern Art. It was actually sort of confusing how the cafe works. As you walk in you can see the menu listed on the board (without prices), and then there were signs that the Expresso Bar was self-served. Once you walk in, the layout of a cafe showcases how the chef prepares your food (mostly salads/sandwiches/coffee/drinks) looks like you could order at a counter bar…So, we thought at MoMA Cafe, you'd have a section where one was for waiter service and the other one for self-service.
To be clear, the Cafe section is all waiter service (we saw a couple other people came in thinking it was partially self-service, too).
We just wanted a place to sit so we ordered some drinks and a dessert (almond cheesecake to share). The drinks were ok and the dessert was quite tasty. We looked at the menu though but nothing else really caught our eyes. If you plan on spending the whole day at MoMA, I supposed this cafe could be one of the places you could eat (there's another cafe upstairs I suppose). However, if you are just pending a few hours/half day at MoMA, maybe grabbing a drink at a beer garden in the courtyard or a drink here at this cafe would be sufficient. Save some money and eat outside of MoMA and you can probably find a wider variety of food (and potentially tastier food) to choose from.
I went here with my friends for the last day of our New York Trip. We went to the cafe first before looking at the museum and all the artworks due to our complaining stomachs. There are two cafes, one on the 2nd floor and one on the 6th floor.
My friends and I ended up eating on the second floor cafe. It is actually a really nice place to go for a first date or just by yourself. When you go in you are greeted by a hostess and seated by the waiter. You get to walk by all the chefs making the food. You can see all the fresh ingredients that separate you through a small glass wall.
We ended up ordering the beet salad, cauliflower soup and the rigatoni pasta to share. My friend said the soup was good and was actually full after finishing it so she slit the pasta with me. The pasta tasted good except that the rigatoni itself seemed a little undercooked. It was flavored well to me and honestly reminded me of creamy hamburger pasta sauce.
Aside from that there are a majority of different selections that they had to offer. I saw a lot of different salads from the tables next to me that I want to try next time.
Came here for starving for lunch before exploring the MoMA. The place was very busy, but we were seated promptly and our waitress attended to us while juggling all the other tables. The restaurant is kind of strange, with patron seated at long tables together kinda of like at a cafeteria….. but with waiters and service. Strange. I would recommend chicken panini over the tuna panini.
A really lovely place to have lunch. I love the soups and antipasti (try the carrots!). Excellent service and feels calm even in the rush of a busy place.
This café is located on the 2nd floor of the MoMA. Museum admission is required to dine inside. We ended up paying $70+tip for an expensive, not so impressive lunch. However, when I compare the food here to the Smithsonian museums in DC, there's a much wider selection of food.
We ordered the prosciutto flatbread, butternut squash soup, caesar salad with anchovy dressing, and tortollini en brodo. The prosciutto flatbread was my most favorite item — full of flavor and the bread texture was crispy but soft at the same time. The butternut squash soup was okay, a little too watery for my liking. The anchovy dressing on the caesar salad didn't taste like anything out of the ordinary, but the portion wag big for the price I paid which I appreciated. My fiancé wasn't satisfied with his tortellini which is surprising because he's a huge fan of pasta.
Even though there's a sign in the beginning of the line that says "your wait is 10 minutes from here," we definitely waited at least 20 minutes before we were sat. False advertising. You can go outside of the museum to eat, but an experience at the MoMA Café is worth checking out at least once.