Meow Wolf Is Opening in NYC With a Restaurant

Meow Wolf, the multifaceted large-scale immersive art installation company, is going to open its first-ever New York location. It’ll be found in Manhattan on Pier 17 in the Seaport, but there is no set address or projected opening date yet.

Typically, Meow Wolf installations include some sort of restaurant and bar serving coffee, food, snacks, and beers, usually sourced from local breweries and vendors. There’s Float Cafe & Bar in Santa Fe, speakeasy bar Datamosh in Vegas, the Real Unreal cafe in Dallas, and the Sips (with a Z) bar and Hellofood cafe in Denver. In Houston, there’s the Cowboix Hevvven, a fuller restaurant and dive bar with its whole afterlife cowboy theming, which opened in late 2024. For the Meow Wolf New York, a rep confirms that there will be some sort of restaurant and/or bar, but there is no confirmed word on what that will be yet.

The company announced the New York City expansion at South by Southwest in Austin today, Monday, March 10 during a panel with Meow Wolf’s co-founder Benji Geary and vice president of public relations and communications Kati Murphy. This would be its seventh location and first in the Northeast region.

Meow Wolf’s sprawling art exhibits around the country incorporate interactive storytelling through multiple settings and plots where attendees can explore distinctive spaces full of videos, music, lights, creatures, and more. Think of an immersive play on Sleep No More but with original stories, really zany art, washing machine slides, and disco kitchens. The Vegas location, named Omega Mart, is centered on a whole bizarre supermarket build-out.

The original Meow Wolf opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2008 by an art collective, becoming a go-to destination. Since then, it’s grown with locations in Vegas, Denver, Dallas, and Houston. There’s one set for Los Angeles, opening in 2026 (presumably, this would imply that the New York one would open after that).

“New York has always been a city that thrives on reinvention,” co-founder Vince Kadlubek shared via the press release, which made the city the right destination for the next location. Most likely, the New York Meow Wolf will incorporate city themes — perhaps using the company’s Plotzo rat king character, who rules the subterranean group known as the Undermallers (per Meow Wolf lore)

Meow Wolf’s New York landlord is the Seaport Entertainment Group (SEG), which is the same landlord for recently opened partying Mexican pop-up-turned-permanent restaurant Gitano also on Pier 17. SEG is also the group that runs Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building.