Mini Art, a Ukrainian company, has an extensive line of buildings and diorama accessories.

Everything from village cottages, city houses, and workshops to middle-eastern ruins. They also market a rather complete line of accessories to go along with their structure kits. These include fencing, staircases, furniture and crockery.

Case in point is the new set of Café Furniture and Crockery. The set includes fifty pieces on five sprues. You get two bistro-style tables and four wooden chairs. You also get one sprue with some crockery. The crockery consists of three plates/saucers and three cups as well as three mugs/steins. On my example, these parts were molded in white. There is also a small sprue of two types of bottles molded in clear green and a small sprue of glasses/stemware, in three styles, molded in clear plastic.

In addition to the kit parts, Mini Art also supplies you with a sheet that contains cafe awnings and signage for three different sidewalk establishments: a cafe, a bistro, or a restaurant. This sheet is printed on glossy paper. What you don't get is a store front for the awnings and signage. But Mini Art does have a French Cafe store front (kit # 35513) that will solve that problem.

The parts are easy to remove from their sprues but the chairs do present you with a number of attachment points that need to be removed. Just take care and all should go well. A nice feature of the kit is that the seat for the chairs is a separate part which makes finishing these bits that much easier.

These accessory items are rather ubiquitous throughout the world and can be finished in just about any color or style you choose and still be appropriate for any scene or era. One item I felt missing was the absence of any labeling for the bottles. Some generic wine labels would have been nice.

The chairs go together easily and with little fuse. I actually spent more time sanding the attachment points off the four parts than I did on assembly. The bistro style tables consist of three parts: table top, pedestal, and base. The base has some nice, molded detail.

Assembly of the bottles, crockery, and glassware is really not much of a chore. Just be careful removing these items from the sprue, smooth off the base, and you're in business. The open end of the glassware might need to be thinned a little with a drill bit, but only if you're a stickler for fidelity to scale. I added just a speck of thinned paint to the inside of the wine glasses for an in-use look. Do take care with the stemware as those bits are a bit fragile when off the sprue and can bend easily.

I fashioned one of the awnings to a cardboard store front and attached it with some tape for some perspective. These items scream for a more permanent, realistic structure but the awnings and signage are still nice to have in the kit.

This release doesn't strike me as a stand alone kit, but these items will enhance just about any setting you can dream up. With some judicious weathering, even the awnings could be utilized for a post-apocalyptic scene.