OTG Expands JFK T5 F&B with Serafina, Mozz Lab, Starbucks

Three new food and beverage concepts opened at JFK International Airport's Terminal 5 this month, as OTG continues to build out what it frames as a neighborhood dining program inside one of North America's busiest air gateways. Mozz Lab, Serafina, and Starbucks bring the terminal's active concession count higher and add to a 2026 roster that already includes Nom Wah, The Halal Guys, and Melt Shop — all opened earlier this year under the same OTG partnership with JetBlue and Fraport USA Inc.

The New Concepts

Mozz Lab, a Brooklyn-based Italian cheese and specialty shop, is the highest-concept addition of the three. The brand anchors its airport unit around housemade mozzarella and a deli program of hot and cold paninis — a format that travels well in a grab-and-go airport environment while still communicating craft. Serafina, the Manhattan-born Italian restaurant founded in 1995 by Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato and now operating across three continents, occupies a full sit-down space designed by David Rockwell and Rockwell Group immediately past the Terminal 5 security checkpoint. The unit offers its full pizza, pasta, and dessert lineup with the throughput speed air travel requires — both dine-in and to-go. Starbucks rounds out the trio as the quick-service anchor, adding mobile-order capability to a terminal where the other new concepts skew table-service.

What This Signals for Airport F&B

The Terminal 5 build-out is embedded inside JetBlue and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's $19 billion JFK transformation program, with Fraport USA developing the concession layer. That funding context matters for operators and vendors tracking where airport F&B capital is flowing: large-scale terminal renovations are increasingly the mechanism through which independent and regional restaurant brands gain access to captive, high-spend airport traffic without taking on traditional retail real estate risk.

For OTG, the curation strategy is deliberate. Rather than filling square footage with national QSR chains alone, the group is using a mix of one global anchor (Starbucks) alongside New York-born independents and regional concepts. That layering — recognizable brand for reliability, local brand for discovery — mirrors what airport retail consultants have been recommending for years, and it now has enough data behind it from hubs like LaGuardia, O'Hare, and SFO to function as a repeatable playbook.

Operators in the foodservice and hospitality supply chain should track two implications here. First, brands with strong regional identity and scalable back-of-house operations are increasingly viable airport candidates — the barrier is less about brand size and more about execution speed and throughput consistency. Second, the design investment at Terminal 5 (Rockwell Group on Serafina's space; a reimagined center concourse modeled on New York parks) signals that airport partners are willing to fund elevated build-outs when the brand story justifies it. That changes the pitch calculus for emerging restaurant groups evaluating non-traditional venue expansion.

For vendors — packaging, POS, commissary, and logistics providers — OTG's continuing Terminal 5 expansion represents a live procurement cycle. Airport F&B operations run on tight ticket times, high volume, and strict security-compliant supply chains, which tend to favor established foodservice distributors and tech-enabled kitchen management systems over direct-to-operator arrangements.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.