One Table Is Enough
PIN-UP speaks to Jon Gray and Mariam Issoufou on how they built a new kind of restaurant in the West Village. Photography by Ashland Mines
By Felix Burrichter:
At first glance, Jon Gray and Mariam Issoufou make an unexpected pairing. A bonafide New Yorker, Harlem-born Gray emerged from the city’s early 2000s cultural maelstrom with a proposition: that food could be a medium as potent as music, fashion, or art. In 2012, he cofounded Ghetto Gastro, the Bronx-based culinary collective that collapses the boundaries between dinner, design object, political gesture, and performance.
Meanwhile, Niger-raised Issoufou founded her architecture practice in Niamey. Mixing academic rigor with material intelligence, she began working with rammed earth and other local construction techniques to design buildings attuned to the particularities of the Sahel climate — an approach that later led to prestigious teaching appointments at ETH Zürich and Harvard.
Then came Niger’s 2023 coup, which forced Issoufou to reconsider the future. She ultimately decided to open an office in the United States, where she had previously completed her graduate studies. Since Gray and Issoufou lease office space in the same New York creative hub, WSA, the inevitable encounter soon occurred. It wasn’t long before they also started their first collaboration: Gourmega, Ghetto Gastro’s first brick-and-mortar restaurant in the United States.