There are artist's artists, then there are artist’s chefs.
Few culinary minds have wielded as much (soft) power on the art world as Mina Stone. The longtime New Yorker has worked with one of the industry’s most mythological dealers, concocted daily meals for one of the last decade’s most ubiquitous artists, and even opened her first restaurant in an art museum. This year, she’s topping off this list of artistic dalliances by joining CULTURED as our new Food Editor-at-Large. When she’s not cooking for pop ups and gallery dinners galore or testing dozens of recipes for her next book, Stone will help shape the magazine’s digital food coverage and our next Art & Food issue (coming to you Summer 2025!). Before she gets started in earnest, we sat down to dish on the scrappy story behind her cult cookbook Cooking for Artists (which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year), treating artists like culinary guinea pigs, and using way more olive oil than most people would consider normal.
Where are you, and what's in your system?
I’m at my house in Brooklyn. I never eat breakfast, but I wanted to take two Advil this morning before I talked to you, so I had two Advil, coffee, homemade granola, and frozen raspberries.
What’s in the granola?
It’s maple syrup and olive oil granola with almonds and cinnamon.
Delicious. Before we get into your career, tell me a bit about the food ecosystem you grew up in and your first interactions with food. Were you a picky eater, or did you eat everything?
My food world as a kid was sort of night and day, depending on whether I was in Boston or Greece with my mother’s family. In Boston, we were a small family—just my mom, my dad, and me—and we ate out a lot. When I was in Greece, it was the polar opposite: family meals twice a day. The food was super Greek and filled with olive oil, which I’m sure comes as no surprise. I remember once in high school, I told my mom I thought olive oil was gross and asked her to stop using so much of it. It was one of those cultural moments I’ll never forget because her face fell. Now, olive oil is the root of my cooking, and I use way more of it than people in the States think is normal.
I wasn’t super picky or adventurous; I was somewhere in between. I really liked chickpeas and lentils. My favorite meals were Greek fried eggs—eggs fried in olive oil—and spaghetti with Greek meat sauce, and they’re still my favorites.
Your mom didn’t cook much, but did you cook with family when you were in Greece?
I gravitated toward cooking. I always wanted to make my own stuff, even if it was just mixtures of flour, water, or whatever I could find in the kitchen. I went to art school for fashion, and after I graduated, I started my own clothing line. I was dating someone who was a private chef, and that was the first time I noticed food in a very specific way. It sounds naive, but I didn’t know that being a private chef was a job. I didn’t know people hired someone to come into their homes and treat it like a restaurant. I just thought, This is awesome; I want to learn. I watched and started making elaborate plated meals for my friends when I was around 24, just practicing and having fun. Then, I cooked privately for a family for about a year and a half while working on my clothing line on the side.
I remember cooking my first dinner party and making a dish I’d never make today. What stands out is how much I relied on recipes—making things that were so textbook. I think it was a seven-vegetable couscous with balsamic salmon. People were patient with me. I cooked things too much or too little. Some dishes were dry; others didn’t come out on time. I was really learning as I went.
One of your big breaks was when Gavin Brown asked you to cook for a gallery dinner. You discovered the food world and the art world around the same time. How do you see those parallel discoveries affecting your experience as a chef?
I stopped cooking for families and, at a young age, started cooking at Gavin’s in the West Village. I didn’t know anything about the art world. I stepped into it innocently, just wanting to cook. I was really into making family-style food, which felt strange and new at Gavin’s gallery [dinners]. Even though people had been doing family-style meals for centuries, it felt different there. I remember Gavin always saying, “More, we need more, Mina. I don’t care if we have leftovers; I just want it to feel insanely bountiful.” That abundance is a stress I still hold today. I’m always asking myself, “Does it feel like too much? It should feel like too much.”
When I first started cooking there, people thought I was part of a performance piece. They’d come upstairs to the gallery and ask, “Is this a performance?” and I’d say, “No, we’re just cooking.” I’ve thought a lot about why it worked. I think it’s because the art world is so intense—fierce, heady, and thought-provoking. To juxtapose that with something so simple and relatable, like food, created a balance. That’s why I think I’ve always been drawn back to artists. I’ve cooked for many kinds of people, but I always end up with artists.
After Gavin, you cooked daily staff lunches for Urs Fischer’s studio. In an interview, he said he and his team were “happy guinea pigs” for you. I love the idea of lunch as a laboratory. Can you tell me about that experience?
When I was cooking at their studio—and honestly, whenever I've cooked for artists—Urs and his team let me do whatever I wanted. They showed me a lot of trust, and that trust gave me the space to stick to it and find my voice. I appreciate that Urs gives me credit, but I have to throw it back to them. They created that environment. For example, they’d say, “This month we’re doing vegan” or “This month we’re doing Japanese.” It was like a month-long challenge. I learned so much during those times.
And Cooking for Artists was Urs’s idea, right?
Yes, I’d been cooking at the studio for a few years, and one day, they said, “We share all these meals together; they should be documented.” It took four years, but we made it happen. It was Urs’s idea to put it all together and have the artists I’d cooked for contribute. I remember when the book came out, we were in LA looking at it, and I was really upset about some of the photographs I took. I had shot everything mostly with my iPhone and a point-and-shoot camera. Urs said, “Mina, whenever a big project comes out, the first thing you’re going to see is what’s wrong with it. You have to let that go, and it will eventually fade.”
He was right. Now, I look at those photographs and love that they’re imperfect or a little blurry. It didn’t really matter because the overarching point of the book was these home-cooked meals that were perfectly imperfect. Making the book was really organic. Neither of us had made a cookbook before, so it was a lot of me documenting everything we ate. I’m like a squirrel, putting things away because I’ve made them so many times that I know they’re good recipes.
You opened Mina’s at MoMA PS1 five years after publishing Cooking for Artists. It’s closed now, but I’d love to know what it was like to cook for a museum-going crowd.
I learned so much about running a restaurant business, which was really important. But I also loved being part of a museum, living with the shows, and being able to see them whenever I wanted. I try to go into every new opportunity with the mindset of learning something. At PS1, I learned a lot—from cooking for two people during the pandemic to thousands of people during events like Warm Up. I loved incorporating artist recipes or references to museum exhibits into my menus. I don’t care whether it’s a good recipe or not. I’m more interested in why someone is cooking, why they like to cook a certain thing, or the psychology behind it. It taught me how to work with institutions like MoMA and bring food into those spaces in ways that appeal to everyone.
What do you want to see more or less of in the food world in 2025?
More kindness, more grace, and less stress.
What’s a dish that represents where you’re at in your life right now?
I make a lot of Greek food, but I also gravitate toward Middle Eastern food. I’ve been making this Persian dish, dal stew. It’s tangy, spicy, salty, and we just keep putting it over rice with a big dollop of yogurt and maybe some greens. It’s perfect and easy.
