Kis Café

Kis Café is a café and bookstore in East Williamsburg housed within Amant's art campus. The space, designed by SO–IL in a converted marble shop, pairs coffee and seasonal food with a curated collection of books tied to Amant's residency and exhibition programs.

Kis is a café and bookstore lodged at the heart of Amant's 21,000-square-foot art campus on Maujer Street: a converted marble shop reclad in scored clay brick and galvanized steel, designed by SO–IL. Coffee and a seasonal menu of sandwiches, salads, and pastries are the entry point; the bookstore, stocked entirely around Amant's curatorial and residency programs, is the point. The books don't wander into fiction. On Friday evenings, the hours stretch to 9 p.m. and the register shifts: the Six to Nine series brings DJ sets, grilled specials off a Northfork Ironworks grill, and open galleries into the same room. The question Kis keeps returning to is whether a café can function as an argument: that food, music, and a carefully chosen shelf of titles are not ornament to the art around them, but continuous with it.