TLDR: Capital One's new JFK lounge is a standout, offering a premium coffee bar and a unique cheesemonger tasting experience. It's a top-tier option for eligible travelers, even worth a terminal hop.
First things first: you need to have the correct card. You can get complimentary access to this lounge if you have either:
Alternatively, if you only have a Venture or Spark Miles card, you can also buy access for $45/person 18 or older.
If you don’t have a valid Capital One card, then you can also purchase access for $90/visitor.
Additionally, you must also have a confirmed seat assignment for a departing or connecting-same day flight within 3 hours of departure time. If you’re bringing guests, everyone is considered independent of each other. This means that if you have a guest with a later flight than you more than 3 hours of departure, they will need to wait while you can enter the lounge yourself (I had a similar incident happen to me where my guest needed to wait 30 minutes while I went into the lounge first with my other friend).
For this lounge in particular, I had a valid boarding pass for an American Airlines flight departing out of Terminal 8. Notably, the Capital One JFK lounge is located in Terminal 4, so the front desk duly reminded me that I would need to make a journey over there. However, this experience goes to show that you can access pretty much any JFK lounge, even if you’re not in the right terminal.
Btw: authorized users on Venture X cards can access the lounge. I’m an authorized user on my girlfriend’s Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card and it’s basically treated the same as a normal card.
The website is unfortunately not very descriptive about where the lounge is located, saying it is “Located on Level 3 in Retail Hall of Terminal 4 near B Gates.”
This is not a great description and took me a while to find it because there are no big signs showing where it is. Basically, when you go through security, you need to go down one level to where all the gates are (Retail Hall). Then, walk towards the B gates and you’ll eventually see it on the left hand side of the walls.
When you walk in, the receptionist is on the right hand side. The friendly guy first asked for my Capital One card and then boarding pass. Once he confirmed I had a valid card, he scanned my boarding pass to confirm my flight was within 3 hours of departure.
After check in, you walk down a little bit and are immediately wowed by a huge coffee area. It’s almost like a fancy coffee shop built straight into the lounge. You can order all types of coffees like lattes, flat whites, and matcha lattes. They even have all types of sandwiches, like smoked salmon bagels.
It’s truly a unique amenity unlike any other lounge I’ve seen. Even the latte was made with a real espresso machine and with latte art.
If you walk a bit further, to the left is the food area and to the right is the bar, bathroom, and showers.
Of course, I chose to check the food section first.
Capital One lounges have these small plates and refreshment sections where they serve a variety of hot and cold foods. Instead of doing big buckets/trays of food, Capital One has individual little plates of food to keep it sanitary and separate from the other food.
However, this is a standard offering across most Capital One lounges. The primary highlight of this lounge is the Cheesemonger.
This incredibly unique amenity is basically a 45 minute cheese tasting experience with a variety of fancy cheeses. They serve a wide variety of soft, hard, and blue cheeses that are quite clearly high quality. One of the cheeses I got also had truffle in it, and it was amongst one of the more unique cheeses I’ve tried.
The “cheesemonger” is the person who manages the cheese section and it’s clear they know quite a bit about the cheeses they’re presenting. They even assemble your custom charcuterie board in front of you. It’s definitely one of my most memorable lounge experiences so far and is a pretty social environment since you’re sitting right next to people… eating fancy cheeses.
One important thing about every lounge I visit is the bathrooms.
I want clean, fresh bathrooms that aren’t horribly busy all the time—this is a problem at some other lounges that don’t have enough bathrooms. For example, while the DFW Venture Lounge is also pretty, there are only 4? Bathrooms to accommodate for the entire airport; way too few.
The JFK lounge has a ton of bathrooms and thankfully, each of them are nice and clean. For some reason, the soap dispensers pump out a ton of soap, so I figure that will likely be changed soon…
While I didn’t really drink anything, it’s a very nice bar. More of a visual exercise rather than an analysis on the drinks.
If you’re at Terminal 4 JFK and can’t access the Delta One lounge, this is an excellent alternative. I think it’s superior to the Chase Sapphire and even the Amex Centurion lounges.
Back then, Amex had a strong foothold in the lounge ecosystem at JFK, but it has let itself slip quite a bit since then. Capital One has one of the top lounges I’ve seen in a while, especially considering you can access it with a relatively low effort credit card.
