One of New York’s most stylish new dining destinations is a dark, cozy room hidden behind a nondescript facade at 116 West Houston Street. The address, between Soho and Greenwich Village, is the service kitchen for the Sustainable Community Kitchen from the chef-led nonprofit Rethink Food, where its teams prepare 30,000 meals weekly for communities in need. But now it has a new attraction: Gourmega is a supper club that is the first permanent outpost by Ghetto Gastro, a Bronx-born creative culinary trio. It serves an artful seven-course menu with a social mission: All proceeds go to funding Rethink Food’s mission to feed neighbors in need.
To design the space, Ghetto Gastro commissioned Mariam Issoufou Architects. The project, completed in a speedy five months, is the first completed U.S. project by the Nigerian architect Mariam Issoufou, who leads her practice from Niamey, Niger; New York; and Switzerland, where she is a professor at ETH Zurich as the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability. Her work occupied a large room within Lesley Lokko’s 2023 Laboratory of the Future architecture exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia. In her interview for Madame Architect, Issoufou told Julia Gamolina that Gray invited her to do whatever she wanted; he “had a vision that [Issoufou] could build the language for, and he trusted [her] to deliver.”
Gourmega builds on centuries of Black life in Manhattan. In the 1600s, the area was the Land of the Blacks, one of North America’s first free African settlements. In the late 1800s, Frank Stephenson operated The Black and Tan, a members club where the community gathered for business and social life, out of a basement on Bleecker Street.
Inspired by this history, Issoufou’s interior adopts the moody environment of a speakeasy. Some walls are finished in a black lime wash atop dark cork floors. Elsewhere, black particle board is used on walls and ceilings. Behind a serving counter, bottles are stored on a light wood shelf. Hip hop pulses from suspended speakers from OJAS, while small bronze wall inserts that reference facial scarification are the work of Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello.
The room’s centerpiece is its communal table for fourteen people designed by Issoufou, shaped as three travertine circles in plan lined by two alabaster connectors, where groupings of three to six people encourage meal sharing and conversation. In reality, the TW2M-fabricated surface breaks apart into seven pieces, which can be set up cafe-style during the day. Issofou also designed the chairs, structured in walnut and finished in black vegan leather.
Gourmega’s visual focal point is at the back of the space: An oversized circular window-door pivots at its center to reveal the back-of-house kitchen. It is a portal: The chefs at work are glimpsed through a yellow translucent haze, their motion felt like shadows on the wall. The move makes the restaurant feel like a theater production, with warm lighting in the kitchen supporting this sensation. Backstage, Gourmega’s team stays busy: Beyond dinner, they also prepare over 3,200 meals a week for community-based organizations across New York.
The Afrocentric Asiactic Americana tasting menu is “rooted in shared traditions, layered flavors, and collective ritual,” per press materials. (A vegetarian version is available and, I can confirm, delicious.) Courses are loaded onto weighty stone tablets from BePolar Design reminiscent of a cafeteria tray and can arrive with considered pairings from Black-owned vineyards and Japanese sakes. The bite-sized bits culminate in a Ghetto Gastro’s take on piragua, a shaved-ice dessert from Puerto Rico.
At $307 per seat plus drinks, the standard meal isn’t cheap, but proceeds go to a good cause. Ghetto Gastro uses food to advance culture. Previously, the collective collaborated on dinners with Virgil Abloh and even Martha Stewart, so Gourmega is primed to be stacked with A-listers. Recently Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) came through to hang with Gray. Thanks to Issoufou, the room is primed to host in style. And its chefs are on the move: Recently, they wrapped on volume 1 of “Afro Asiatic Americana” and are on to volume 2. “Pull up and chew with us,” they wrote on Instagram recently. Reservations are only available via DM, so now’s the time to start sliding into their inbox to make plans.