“If I have expertise in anything, it’s naturally creating an experience,”
The art collector and restaurateur VALERIE MNUCHIN talks to JANET MERCEL how her late father Robert Mnuchin’s legacy lives on at Shelter Island’s Léon 1909.
I met Valerie Mnuchin more than a decade ago, while working for the interior design firm that was renovating her houses in New York and Wainscott. This design work often brought me face to face with a client’s contemporary art collection, but this was the first time, I remember, that I’d ever stood in someone’s house and thought, “These people actually love their stuff.” Collectors can go their whole lives without feeling any real emotion toward the objects they’ve gathered around them. Mnuchin’s family — with their Anish Kapoor sculptures, their Joe Bradley paintings and Ryan McGinley photographs — were clearly not like most collectors.
Ten years later, on a summer night at her restaurant, Léon 1909, Valerie Mnuchin is answering phones, taking reservations, and greeting guests in apple-green evening pajamas. Mnuchin hasn’t so much transported diners to the Côte d’Azur as she has transported a Provençal farmhouse to Shelter Island. High ceilings, copper chandeliers, and open-flame chambersticks give the room an airy, barn-like feel. The 14-foot hearth fire glows with a row of trussed and roasting chickens.
“If I have expertise in anything, it’s naturally creating an experience,” Mnuchin says. “We try to make people feel like they’ve stepped into a place they could call home. It’s a family project. My father is no longer with us, but now the family is Armond [Joseph, chef] and Chris [Clark, general manager], and me. I wouldn’t keep doing this without them.”
“I thought he was completely crazy, because I’d never dreamed of opening a restaurant.”
In 2022, Mnuchin opened Léon 1909 with her father, Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street giant and art dealer. She had always loved taking the ferry to Shelter Island for day trips with her family, and one day Robert, who passed away in December 2025 at the age of 92, suggested she take over the old local bank building. “I thought he was completely crazy, because I’d never dreamed of opening a restaurant,” Mnuchin says. But as such projects go, once they tore into the structure, they ended up pretty much bringing the whole thing down. Out went the shag carpet and popcorn ceiling; in went a wood-burning open fire in the kitchen.
For Robert Mnuchin, this was yet another instance of professional reinvention. After thirty-three years at Goldman Sachs, the art lover (he once placed a winning bid at Christie’s of $91.1 million for Jeff Koons’ Rabbit, the most ever paid at the time for a living artist’s work) had opened Mnuchin Gallery in its historic East 78th Street townhouse in 1992 (originally as C&M Arts and then L&M Arts). Valerie had helped at the gallery over the years, but in a minor way, she emphasizes — certainly not on the level of a partner.
“This was completely different,” she says. “Honestly, the honor of my life. I learned so much from him about excellence, and his relentlessness in the pursuit of it.” Robert let her take the reins at Léon 1909. “He would say, “This is all you.’” It wasn’t entirely — “He was right there the whole time watching over me, but not in a controlling way. In a guidance way. It was the ultimate parenting role.”
In 2025, Léon 1909 won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. Last May, Amani Martin, the Emmy-winning producer and director and Léon regular, threw a dinner there honoring 150 years of the Westminster Dog Show. The restaurant recreated the historic 1877 menu from the first “Best in Show” dinner; Chef Armond Joseph updated the littlenecks to razor clams, and the bisque de homards to lobster custard with roe. The spirit of the kitchen — fresh fish from the sea, the fire, the garden — comes straight from Robert Mnuchin’s childhood summers in the South of France. The Léon of the restaurant name refers to his Belgian father, who Valerie never met. “But he loomed large in my head,” she says: “a very elegant European gentleman from a different time. He rode with hounds, was a great wine connoisseur, he collected young unknown artists. And people always said I looked like him.”
Robert Mnuchin was once quoted in The New York Times: “The reason to buy art is because you love it, you love it, you love it.” Valerie, the youngest of five children by several years, went everywhere with her parents. “Every studio visit, every art opening. They just lived and consumed art,” she says. “I grew up inside that. I wouldn’t have bought anything on my own that I didn’t feel that same passion for.” Art collecting now, she believes, has become a very different landscape: “It’s a trophy, a status symbol, a business with a consultant in the middle, and that’s just not how I grew up. If I can’t get into an artist’s head and feel where they’ve been, it’s not interesting to me.” She tells a story, which she also told as part of her father’s eulogy, about the two of them moving art around his apartment at seven o’clock at night, picking up and rehanging a ten-foot Willem de Kooning: “We did it ourselves, and that was the fun of it.”
“If I can’t get into an artist’s head and feel where they’ve been, it’s not interesting to me.”
Mnuchin Gallery closed in January of this year, and in May, Robert Mnuchin’s collection went up for sale at Sotheby’s. Titled Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart, the auction generated $433.1 million in sales in one night, including the now infamous $85.8 million for Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Red. For Valerie, it was like losing members of her family all over again. “I went to see the collection hanging before the sale,” she says. “I found it completely devastating. We sat upstairs for the sale itself, and it was awful, honestly. Very raw. It was harder than I thought it would be.”
Back at Léon 1909, Mnuchin returns to the very unsocialite-like role of being in the trenches of running a restaurant. Now five years old, Léon has become the dependable community respite from the transient Hampton summer crowd she and Robert Mnuchin hoped it would be. It’s also something tangible to hold onto, a project she started with her father that has since become its own branch of the family. The art was always another. Mnuchin’s sister recently bought back a pair of sculptures that had been in their parents’ collection “forever.” “I told her last night I feel like they’re coming home,” Mnuchin says. “These pieces were like our siblings. It’s just part of how we grew up.”
