Oberon, OMA‘s first restaurant in the United States, treats the ground floor of New Museum’s new wing not as a hospitality fit-out but as a freestanding box wrapped almost entirely in black expanded cork. Designed by OMA under Partner Shohei Shigematsu and Associate/Project Architect Jake Forster, the restaurant belongs to The Oberon Group — the team behind Rhodora, June, Anais, and Rucola — and opens June 26 as the museum’s first-ever full-service restaurant. What follows is less an interior than a case for where a museum ends and a restaurant begins, built almost entirely out of a single material most people have only ever seen as a wine-bottle stopper.
A box inside a lobby is how OMA itself frames the premise. Museum restaurants typically belong to their institutions in name only — operationally distinct, rarely generating an identity of their own — and Oberon was built specifically to avoid that fate, occupying the ground floor of OMA’s own expansion of the New Museum as a freestanding box of its own. “We imagined the restaurant both as part of, and independent from the museum,” Shigematsu said. “Conceived as a freestanding box inserted into the ground floor lobby, it will be accessible from the building’s front and back, day to night. Inside, a large dining room and fixed pockets of seating will offer space to gather or retreat.” Against the museum’s bright, industrial lobby, Oberon’s own face is deliberately more organic — the fact sheet calls it “hidden-in-plain-sight,” resembling a jewel box or an inverted white cube gallery sitting inside the real one.
Two entrances, no back is the mechanism that makes that independence functional rather than rhetorical. During the day, Oberon opens directly off the New Museum’s atrium, serving both museum visitors and walk-in diners; in the evening, when the museum itself closes, access shifts entirely to a dedicated speakeasy-style entrance from Freeman Alley, with door policy built to prioritize the neighborhood over museum foot traffic. The restaurant’s boxy envelope was shaped specifically to hold both conditions at once, without ever reading as though it has a single front or back.
A diner’s logic, reworked governs the room itself. Oberon takes its cue from the classic New York diner: one open dining room wrapped by a continuous ribbon window along the façade, built to be reconfigured rather than fixed to a single layout. Around its outer edge run a set of booths the studio describes as looking “seemingly excavated from a singular material” — a detail that turns the room’s flexible core and its fixed perimeter into two different registers of the same material logic, rather than two competing design decisions.
Cork as the central claim is what actually built that perimeter. The restaurant’s exterior walls, ceiling, and the banquettes ringing the dining room are composed entirely from black expanded cork, with the exterior façade and ceiling domes finished in silver leaf — one of the first large-scale uses of cork in a U.S. commercial hospitality setting, sourced through the Portuguese manufacturer Sofalca. “Composed entirely from black expanded cork the restaurant uses a novel sustainable material which gives a rich softness counter to the museum’s white box galleries,” Forster said. “Produced in blocks by heating cork offcuts to a high temperature, the cork self-bonds by its natural resins… we have embraced its qualities, carving an intimate and hidden cavern, a new communal space, embedded within the museum.” Harvested by hand from the bark of the cork oak without felling the tree, the sustainable material regenerates naturally every 9 to 12 years, stores carbon across its life cycle, and is fully biodegradable — real environmental logic behind what otherwise reads as a purely atmospheric choice.
Furniture with its own signature fills that cork-lined shell. Minjae Kim designed a full custom suite for the space — tables and a bar top in hand-sculpted ash furniture, hand-finished, alongside lighting fixtures in resin-dipped fiberglass above the banquettes — marking his first permanent public commission in New York. “The booths and the bar table has my signature lacquer finish with a lot of varying texture,” Kim said. “The challenge was to quiet my contribution and avoid overpowering the full experience.”
Light, art, and a closed loop round out the room. Shrine Oberon, a digital work by artist Ian Cheng displayed across the entire back bar, doubles as the bar’s principal ambient light source — an evolving AI-driven piece rather than a fixed screen, meant to grow familiar to regulars the way a bartender who remembers their order would. The restaurant’s parting chocolate, created by artist Laurie Anderson, closes every meal. And beneath the commissions, the kitchen runs on the same logic as the walls around it: zero-waste and scope-3 carbon neutral or negative, with no single-use plastics, and a plant-focused menu from Executive Chef Julia Sherman and Chef de Cuisine Ali Ghriskey built largely on Hudson Valley producers.
A density worth questioning, once the numbers are on the table: 120 seats across 2,500 sf (230 sm), organized around a 24-foot (7.3-meter) wooden bar, twenty modular two-top tables, and nine cork-wrapped booths. Whether a museum restaurant needs its own artist commissions, its own ambient AI artwork, and a first-of-its-kind U.S. application of expanded cork is a fair question to sit with — Oberon’s density of commissioned work rivals a small gallery in its own right, and the museum upstairs may find itself competing with its own ground floor for a visitor’s attention rather than simply extending it downward.
Oberon by OMA | Location: 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 — Year: 2026 — Key materials: black expanded cork, silver leaf, hand-finished ash, resin-dipped fiberglass