Last Call: Reflecting on Winona’s
By Ian MacAllen on Sunday, December 21st, 2025 at 4:48 am
Winona’s opened in the middle of a pandemic, the generational defining pandemic, and still somehow managed to make a mark. Earlier this month, the restaurant announced it was closing after five years.
Winona’s soft-opened in November of 2020 just as a new wave of COVID and COVID restrictions beset New York City. Restaurants could only operate at 25 percent of indoor capacity and the city had a curfew. The subway wasn’t even running overnight.
Cressida Greening and husband Emir Dupeyron had actually taken possession of the space back in 2019, but as anyone involved in construction or opening a business knows, in New York City, there are delays. Greening was the chef, Dupeyron came from a family of restaurateurs. They named the restaurant after their familydog.
When Winona’s opened, it served breakfast with dishes like overnight oats. But new COVID restrictions limited what they could do. They shifted to pastries in the morning, with Greening baking her own croissants.
For dinner service, they opened an elaborate outdoor dining setup on Flushing Avenue in January of 2021. The structure was covered, heated, and still open to the air, achieving an ideal compromise. The official grand opening wasn’t until March of 2021.
The wine list also played to the natural and low intervention wine trends that have defined contemporary dining. The wines were lighter, sometimes fizzy, often unexpected. They were not always good. The adventurous list was proof enough for much of the press to refer to Winona’s as a wine bar. Were our expectations for a unique wine selection so low? The menu was too complex for me to ever think of it as a wine bar.
The standout was the food, of course. It was ambitious, but accessible. It was well executed, and dishes were consistent, and then more refined over time. It was hard to go wrong because the flavors and the combinations on each plate were thoughtful, intentional.
One noteworthy aspect of the restaurant was the interior, a celebration of light wood, pastel colors, of life and light. It was distinctly a rejection of the Williamsburg of the past two decades, the worn out industrial look of exposed brick, dark wood, dark colors, black painted ceilings. Brooklyn dining was trending in this direction anyway, like the pinkish interior of Carthage Must Be Destroyed (closed).
But Winona’s interior nailed the new aesthetic. It was delicate, but fun. Rounded corners, velvet cushions, a refined post-modern, mid-90s look, an increasingly common pattern, like at the recently opened Lulla’s Bakery.
Winona’s was a new kind of Brooklyn restaurant. High-brow food, but casual. Arguably, the earlier years of the 21st century have focused on making low-brow food high-brow, or taking existing stodgy high-brow food and simply reinventing it. The new Brooklyn, the post-pandemic Brooklyn is about creating new dishes, making them sophisticated, but serving them in a far more comfortable setting. Like Rolo’s in Queens, it offered a new take on American cuisine – that is, it mixed and matched the best influences on American plates and put out something new and unique, but not so weird we wouldn’t know it as food. It was Italian-ish. But the Scotch egg was a highlight. There was Mediterranean, Spanish, Mexican, central American – the flavors of New York City, on a plate, elevated.
Earlier this year, the couple opened a new restaurant, Delores, in a section of Bed Stuy that nobody would confuse with Williamsburg (as several early reporters called the location of Winona’s on the southside of Flushing Avenue). It’s named for Emir’s grandmother. To celebrate, they hosted a party streetside in at Winona’s. It’s rare anyone will attend their own funeral, but it turns out Winona’s did.
The new restaurant leans more toward the Mexican influences that were lightly hinted at at Winona’s. There are of course, no COVID restrictions to hamper their efforts. People are on line before the doors open at 5 p.m.. Dubbed Winona’s sister restaurant, it seems Delores has a bright future, even if she will be an only child.
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Winona’s opened, officially, a few weeks before the birth of my son. To say that I was disengaged from restaurant dining, or writing about food and restaurants would be an understatement. A year later, when vaccines had been rolled out and instead of a newborn baby, we had a toddler, I remerged into the world, reconnected with friends, and had a few adult meals. Winona’s was one of these early outings.
The first time I ate at Winona’s was in March of 2022. My friend Clayton organized the dinner, and since he too had a toddler at home, and children under 3 weren’t eligible for vaccines then, we sat outside in the perfectly comfortable dining shed. We mixed and matched a number of dishes.
I enjoyed the meal enough that three months later, when my in-laws were watching our son for the evening, my wife and I made reservations. We were lucky to have one of those rare June days in New York when the weather was perfect and daylight lasts forever.
I saved the images fully intending to write up the experience. Years passed. I would get back there, eventually, I told myself. I could compare dishes, how they evolved over time. And then I was scrolling through restaurant news items and saw it: Winona’s was closing. I would never be back.
Collected here are some of the dishes I had back in 2022 over two dinner services in March and June.
By far the stand out dish was the scotch egg. I enjoyed it so much the first time, I insisted we share one when I went back.
The whipped ricotta salad was a standout, and one of the reasons I wanted to go back. The dish in June was topped with peppery greens and strawberries.
In March, a salad of citrus and beets topped the cheese.
The arancini was another favorite. These are probably more accurately called a suppli al telephono, a Roman version of the arancini.
The tortilla Espanola was fine – but not the standout dish I want it to be, though lots of other people enjoy it. There’s a recipe for the dish from Winona’s at Modern Luxury.
The fried lasagna was absolutely one of the best dishes on the menu. I spent a lot of time thinking about how they must have made this dish.
Check out that cross section.
The smoked fish dip was an interesting dish to try, but overall I was glad to not be the only one eating it.
There are a few more dishes from the dinners below, though my notes on them have been lost to time.
