Chefs Are Opening Ambitious New Restaurants Inside Their Existing Restaurants

The age of restaurant inception is here.

To get to the four seat tasting counter at Ambra in Philadelphia’s Queen Village neighborhood, diners have to enter another restaurant. They walk through the door at Southwark — a polished American tavern — past the mahogany bar, back into the nucleus of the restaurant: the kitchen. Once there, they’ll sit at a counter in prime position to watch a multi-course Italian feast — swirls of saffron tagliatelle with pheasant, roasted chestnut, and chanterelle mushroom ragu, pumpkin and white truffle risotto — come to life just a few feet away.

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Ambra is a restaurant within a restaurant — essentially a new dining experience, with its own distinct menu, style, and identity, inside an existing restaurant space. Owners of both restaurants, Marina de Oliveira and Chris D'Ambro, also the chef, got the idea for the concept one winter night several years ago, when they had just one reservation scheduled, with one diner. Instead of bringing in a server, D’Ambro flipped a pasta board to make a ledge and cooked for the lone guest in the kitchen.

“For the first time in a long time, I felt really fulfilled and remembered why we wanted to get into this business in the first place,” says the chef. The couple added the kitchen dining experience and, in a separate room, one communal table. And while Ambra and Southwark have different menus, dishes for both are made in the same kitchen.

The concept seems to be everywhere these days. You can now order a vegan burger and thrice fried potatoes at chef Daniel Humm’s Clemente Bar, the brand new, still-elegant but more approachable spot just up a set of stairs from Eleven Madison Park. You can have Cote de Boeuf carved tableside in the formal main dining room at the Golden Swan in New York’s West Village, or pop into the townhouse’s casual first floor Wallace Room for a Martini or a plate of housemade cavatelli.

Or you can experience the multi-course tasting menu at Sirius, the four-seat chef’s counter inside 2019 F&W Best New Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant Dōgon at the Salamander hotel in Washington, D.C., where the chef himself cooks during special pop-up dinners.

“From the outset, Dōgon was designed to offer this type of personalized chef experience, especially with the open kitchen,” Onwuachi says. “It’s always dope getting to cook and plate and talk to guests that close up. It’s why I got into cooking.”

In an era of rising restaurant costs and creative survival strategies, chefs are finding innovative ways to maximize space, revenue, and culinary creativity by embedding entirely new dining concepts within their existing places. These restaurant within restaurant models aren't just about survival, though. They’re a kind of reimagining of dining — allowing operators to experiment with cuisines, test diners’ appetites for new concepts, and offer guests a novel experience without the financial risk of launching a standalone restaurant.

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There’s a long history of these smart and novel concepts, including the speakeasy-esque cocktail bar Please Don’t Tell, which opened in 2007 inside a hot dog shop in New York’s East Village. Danny Bowien and Anthony Myint first opened Mission Chinese in San Francisco in 2010 as a pop-up inside an existing Chinese restaurant. 

And chef Evan Hennessey opened the much-lauded Stages at One Washington in Dover, New Hampshire in 2012, but added The Living Room in 2021. While Stages features a meticulous tasting menu highlighting progressive New England cuisine, guests can drop by the Living Room to snack on warm Castelvetrano olives and “bar nuts” with seeds and candied ginger while playing board games from the comfort of a leather couch.

“It really took me staring at the space for a long time to figure out what made the most sense to compliment our tasting menu seating in the kitchen,” says Hennessey. “It was the perfect way to offer our guests the same level of comfort and hospitality but without the commitment of the higher priced tasting menu reservation.”

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Plus, says the chef, there’s a financial upside, “diversifying our revenue and giving our guests a different option to come to us,” he says. “From a food cost and sourcing perspective, it gives us another outlet for the food, and our food cost has gone down even further.”

On the flip side of offering more accessibility, opening a second space inside an existing restaurant can create a perceived or real scarcity, and thus an exclusivity. Four seats pop up only on occasion at ​​Onwuachi’s Sirius, announced on Instagram. At Four Seasons Resort Los Cabos at Costa Palmas, the property added one chef’s table for up to 12 guests within its larger restaurant, Límon, which they’re calling “the smallest restaurant in Baja.”

“The concept is simple: one table, one seating, so each guest feels as though they are experiencing something truly unique and special,” says executive chef Fabio Quarta. “Because once it’s booked, it is booked, you cannot get in.”

Adding a second concept can not only create buzz and diversify the offerings (and with it, the revenue), but for some operators, it’s also just more fun. For chefs like D'Ambro, these nested dining experiences are a rebellion against restaurant monotony. "So many restaurants don't feel special anymore," he says. "But we're trying to make it special."