My spouse and I
visited the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) on a Saturday afternoon in
mid-January 2020. The museum is open Fridays through Sundays (closed Mondays
through Thursdays) from 12:00 noon until 6:00 pm. Admission costs $14 per adult
(with one food tasting) or $25 (with additional food tastings). We spent about
one hour at MOFAD. The front of the space contains a gift shop, coat rack,
restroom, and Smell-o-Vision station.
MOFAD opened in
October 2015 in a three-story building across from McCarren Park in
Williamsburg. (Reportedly, it will relocate to the Upper East Side in April
2020.) The museum occupies the street level of the building, which has a
high-ceiling open-space warehouse feel. One area of the museum includes a demonstration
kitchen where chefs create dishes for the patrons seated at the counter in
front of them. (We had just come from lunch nearby at the Llama Inn, so we were
too full to sample any of the food.)
When we visited, the
exhibition was called CHOW and focused on Chinese food and restaurants in
America. Although we knew the focus of the exhibition prior to our visit, we
expected CHOW to be a rotating exhibit among a more permanent collection of
other food-related items and displays, which was not the case. The CHOW exhibit
was the entire museum. Although we found the subject matter interesting
(particularly the restaurant menus from around the country), we previously
visited the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in October 2017 (see our
separate review) and some of the information was repetitive.
Our visit to the
Museum of Food and Drink was satisfactory, but we would not recommend that
tourists go out of their way to visit.
