Hobart's MONA has a new light-filled wing and tapas bar, Faro

There's a pig's eye staring from a sphere of ice at the top of your black margarita; lab-coated ushers guiding patrons into a gigantic powdery sphere, and beyond, others are eating, well, pretty standard plates of Spanish tapas. Do you know where you are yet? Could you be anywhere other than David Walsh's Hobart gallery MONA? I doubt it.

Pharos is a new light-focused wing of the Berriedale art museum, which opened in late December. It stars large-scale artworks designed to trip your senses and has a tapas restaurant and bar, Faro.

Open during museum hours and onwards to dinner, Faro is slinging upscaled, though very familiar Spanish plates and snacks from executive chef Vince Trim – gildas (the famed Basque olive, anchovy and pepper pintxos), fried oyster and chorizo bocadillos, and Cape Grim beef cheeks, slow-braised in pedro ximenez alongside those button-pushing cocktails and the estate's own Moo Brew beer range and Moorilla wines.

More than the dining bridge between the low-key offering of MONA's wine bar and the formal mod-Oz menu at its fine diner, Source, Faro's main draw is the integration of the sense-bending art – notably the four custom works by American light artist, Auaker and cattle rancher James Turrell.

By day, you enter through a spacey, luminescent tunnel via the current major MONA exhibition, the Museum of Everything, and emerge to a full eyeful of the Derwent River through panoramic windows.

Before or between snacks you might don soft socks to enter Turrell's Event Horizonexperience and have your other senses rattled by the nearby works of Richard Wilson, Jean Tinguely, Randy Polumbo and Charles Ross.

But it's also worth booking and paying the extra $25 for Unseen Seen, the additional two Turrell experiences (30 minutes total), in which you'll enter the giant pearl-like sphere at the fore of the restaurant and chase with a sensory deprivation revival.

Faro is open to MONA visitors from 11.30am-6pm; dinner 6pm onwards. 655 Main Road, Berriedale, Hobart, 03 6277 9904, mona.net.au/eat-drink/faro-tapas