Two restaurants are opening within walking distance of the N and W trains this October, and they are betting on opposite theories of what people in western Queens actually want to eat.
One is a small café inside a museum, handed to a chef who has never run a restaurant of his own. The other is one of the largest dining rooms Astoria has ever leased, backed by a 15-year commitment and a landlord willing to ask $400,000 a year for the privilege. Both land on Steinway Street's doorstep and Long Island City's front porch in the same four-week window. Neither one is hedging.
The Museum That Can't Stop Auditioning Chefs
MoMA PS1 has spent more than a decade treating its ground-floor kitchen like a residency program rather than a lease. From 2012 to 2019, it was M. Wells Dinette, a reimagined version of the beloved Long Island City diner that critics singled out for fitting the museum's texture without imitating a museum cafeteria. When that closed, the space went to Mina's, chef Mina Stone's Greek-inflected menu, which ran until 2023. Since then it has quietly been coffee, tea, and pastries, a placeholder waiting for its next resident.
That resident arrives in early October as Symone, the first restaurant DeVonn Francis has ever opened under his own name. Francis founded the culinary studio Yardy World in 2017, building a reputation for immersive dinners built around Caribbean cuisine rather than a fixed storefront. Symone pulls from that same well, drawing on his Jamaican and Caribbean roots but framing the menu as French African: curry chicken salad sandwiches, patties, cod and rice porridge, soft serve, and a rotating slate of pastries served alongside La Cabra coffee. The design, handled by architectural studio Marsollier Villacorta, leans into the building's history as a public schoolhouse rather than covering it up, and the space will open onto the museum's terrace for outdoor seating.
Before the storefront opens, Francis is giving western Queens a preview. From September 24 through 27, he'll offer select Symone menu items at Printed Matter's NY Art Book Fair, held on the same MoMA PS1 grounds. If you want to taste the menu before it's officially serving daytime crowds, that four-day window is the move.
What makes Symone worth watching isn't just the food. It's that MoMA PS1 keeps treating this address like an experiment rather than a fixture, three different concepts in fourteen years, and each one has been asked to do the same impossible job: feel like it belongs to the neighborhood and to the art crowd at the same time.
The Restaurant Astoria Didn't Have Room For, Until Now
A few train stops away, at the base of the Pistilli Towers office building on Newtown Avenue, a different kind of bet just got made. Chef Albin Vincent, who built a following on Manhattan's Upper East Side with Lungi, a South Indian and Sri Lankan menu drawing on his upbringing in Kanyakumari and his Sri Lankan roots, is bringing that concept across the East River. The Astoria location signed a 15-year lease for 7,500 square feet, split between 5,000 square feet on the ground floor and 2,500 square feet of outdoor patio, according to lease details reported by Commercial Observer. Asking rent on the deal was $400,000 a year.
To put that footprint in context: most of Steinway Street's dining scene runs on storefronts a fraction that size, corner spots built for a counter, a few tables, and a line out the door during peak hours. A 7,500-square-foot restaurant is a different animal, closer to what you'd expect from a suburban shopping center than a dense residential strip. The brokerage that arranged the deal, Meridian Retail Leasing, called it one of the largest restaurant spaces in Astoria.
The space itself has a recent history worth noting. It was most recently home to Katch, a brew pub that closed in late 2025, and before that it sat inside a building that has mostly served office and medical tenants, including ENT & Allergy Associates and BraceTown Orthodontics. A restaurant of this scale moving into what has functioned as an office lobby retail slot signals that landlords along this stretch see dining as worth building around, not just filling in.
One detail worth flagging if you're planning to visit: coverage of the opening hasn't fully agreed on what the sign will say. Commercial Observer, Eater New York, and The Infatuation describe the project as a second Lungi location. A separate fall preview from Italian Food's cfood.org refers to the same Newtown Avenue address as Ghungroo, an Indian gastropub from the same chef. Both point to the identical building and the identical opening month, so this may simply be a case of the branding settling closer to launch. Either way, expect chaats, pani puri, tandoor-roasted meats, biryani, and a full bar built around what one preview described as Bollywood energy.
Here's what's confirmed for both openings, side by side:
- Symone (MoMA PS1, Long Island City): opens early October 2026, menu preview September 24 to 27 at the NY Art Book Fair, free with museum admission, indoor and terrace seating.
- Lungi / Ghungroo (31-19 Newtown Avenue, Astoria): opening October 2026, 7,500 square feet across indoor dining and patio, full bar, replacing the closed Katch brew pub space.
What Both Openings Are Actually Testing
Put next to each other, these two projects aren't really competing for the same customer. They're testing two different assumptions about what western Queens dining can support right now.
MoMA PS1 is betting that a museum café works best when it stays small, changes hands every few years, and lets a single chef's point of view carry the space rather than building toward permanence. Fourteen years and three concepts in, that's not a failure of planning. It's the model. The museum isn't trying to anchor a dining destination. It's trying to keep giving its neighbors and its art crowd a reason to stick around after the galleries close.
The Newtown Avenue project is making the opposite bet: that Astoria can now support a restaurant built at a scale usually reserved for Manhattan or a suburban retail corridor, with a 15-year lease signaling the landlord and tenant both expect this to be a fixture, not a phase. A brew pub occupied that footprint before it closed. Whether a significantly larger, cocktail-forward concept can do better in the same shell is the real question this opening answers, one way or another, over the next year.
For anyone who already lives between Steinway Street and the Long Island City waterfront, both stories are worth tracking for what they say about how this stretch of Queens keeps changing shape. A museum still willing to hand its kitchen to a first-timer, and a landlord willing to bet $400,000 a year that Astoria has room for restaurants built at a completely different scale, are two very different signals pointing at the same neighborhood.
If you're the kind of person who reads restaurant openings as a way of understanding where a neighborhood is headed, October is going to tell you more about western Queens than most quarters do. Tide Realty Group keeps a close eye on how these shifts play out across the boroughs, because the same signals that tell you where to eat next often tell you where a block is headed next. Rise With Us.
