The Restaurant Trends That Defined 2024

Emily Wilson
·9 min read

Photo by Brittany Conerly

If last year's restaurant culture was defined by endlessly creative martinis and heated debates over tipping, then in 2024 it was all about sourdough conchas and bars with seriously good food. We cooled it on the booze, took up tea, and lined up for pastries at genre-defying bakeries.

Some of the most fun we’ve had in a year full of smash burgers and Caesar salads involved menus shaped by culinary crossovers: Restaurant takeovers and guest dinners are the moment’s favorite way to party—for restaurant staff and diners alike.

In a movement that’s been building for years, many of this year’s most exciting chefs and bakers make food unique to their identities and backgrounds. In the US and abroad, women are now running some of the most esteemed restaurants in the world, reshaping the dining landscape from New York to Saõ Paolo to Paris.

These eight trends shaped restaurant culture in 2024.

The Golden Era of Chef Crossovers is Here

A spirit of collaboration was the underlying theme defining this year’s best new restaurants. As restaurant editor Elazar Sontag wrote in September, “Chefs across the country are wholeheartedly embracing collaboration, pulling ideas from cooks and waiters, their mentors, and other restaurants to create unique menus infused with personality and a real sense of place.”

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The spirit of pandemic-era pop-ups is evolving, and restaurant takeovers have become a favorite mode of culinary expression for chefs nationwide. Now even chefs with brick-and-mortar restaurants are popping up at other restaurants—to stay fresh and leverage each others’ networks. On any given night it’s become common to find a chef from one corner of the country (or globe) taking over the kitchen of another. Chefs are paying attention to the work of their colleagues, taking note of other restaurants that embody their cooking styles or culinary philosophy. This results in all-too-fleeting dinners capturing a sense of combined creativity.

San Francisco’s Zuni Café at Quo Vadis in London. New York’s HAGS at Oyster Oyster in DC. Birdie’s of Austin at New York’s Gramercy Tavern. The famed Bistrot Paul Bert of Paris popping up at Leo in Brooklyn. There was a time when destination dining required much more travel. Now, as talented chefs rove freely, the most difficult part is booking your spot. (Follow your favorite restaurants on Instagram and check in often, as these meals tend to sell out as quickly as word spreads.)

We’re Drinking Less…

“Nobody’s drinking anymore.” That’s how one Los Angeles restaurateur put it to me bluntly over coffee the other week. While that’s an exaggeration, it’s been reported many times over that the youth aren’t drinking like past generations—data published by the International Wine and Spirits Record in May found that 54% of Gen Z consumers of legal drinking age have abstained from alcohol in the past six months. As a result, wine and liquor sales are down at restaurants, and restaurateurs are feeling it. Historically, mark-ups on alcohol have been a surefire way to generate profit, but that’s changing. The silver lining is that the NA drinks boom is only getting louder, and diners are willing to spend on carefully crafted no-booze beverages.

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Many of the bars that made Bon Appétit’s list of the Best New Bars of 2024 place a high value on booze-free cocktails. New York’s Superbueno serves an NA mole Negroni for $18.50, while the menu at Wildchild in Shawnee, Kansas, features a remarkable list of 14 non-alcoholic drinks, including alcohol-free twists on classics like the French 75 and an espresso martini.

…But Bars Have Become Dinner Destinations

Bar del Monte. Bar Contra. Bar Siesta. Bar Blanc. It’s not just a naming convention—some of this year’s most exciting restaurants are, well, bars. The economic reality of operating a restaurant is as challenging as ever in 2024, and opening a lively bar is an opportunity that just makes sense to some restaurateurs: quicker turn times, lower labor costs, more drinks served. Diners are all in, too. After all, a bar with a serious food program can transform a night flitting from drinks to dinner into a destination-worthy one-stop shop.

Meetinghouse in Philadelphia serves precise but unfussy pub fare and housemade beers on draft. Californian newcomers Four Kings and Budonoki are both izakayas, the former Cantonese and the latter inflected with Thai influence. New York’s Penny and Providence’s Gift Horse are fancified raw bars, with long slabs of marble as their centerpiece and food more captivating than the seafood counters of yesteryear. And Nashville has Bad Idea, a wine bar with sharable Lao plates, plus a late-night menu that includes decadent pain perdu with kaya and caviar. We may be drinking less, but we're still making a beeline for the bar—so long as the food is great.

It’s Tea Time in America

For centuries tea has been a fixture from Taiwan to Ukraine. In 2024 the US got on board with the ritualistic, health-related, and flavor-packed benefits of drinking tea. On TikTok, young people partake in #teatime by smearing clotted cream on scones and gathering for finger sandwiches, and global tea traditions have taken center stage at many of this year’s most compelling new bars and restaurants.

At Swadesi Cafe in Chicago, cardamom and condensed milk-laced masala chai and a selection of teas are paired with paneer bhurji puffs and jaggery chocolate chip cookies. The Chinese American Liu’s Cafe in Los Angeles serves richly flavored pots of tea, fruit-based iced teas, and Hong Kong-style milk teas alongside matcha cream-filled pineapple buns and spicy pork wontons. And Nashville’s Kisser is an ode to the Japanese teahouses known as kissaten.

Bakeries Just Keep Getting Better

In March, Bon Appétit reported on the rise of a new generation of inspired bakeries blending varied cultural influences and introducing diners to rich baking traditions that have not gotten their moment in the American spotlight until now. The movement has only continued to pick up steam. Lauded baker Zoë Kanan recently opened Elbow Bread in Manhattan, where she’s baking flakey sauerkraut-potato knishes, cider challah honey buns, and other Jewish diaspora-inspired treats. In Los Angeles, Jiyoon Jang runs Modu, where she serves inventive baked goods informed by her Korean American upbringing, like dark chocolate mochi brownies and slices of kabocha-persimmon cake.

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This charge is being led in large part by bakers riffing and building on traditional Latinx recipes to craft creative pan dulce. There’s Ximena Suarez, whose San Francisco bakery Florecita Panadería is devoted to conchas in flavors like apple pie and champurrado, and Mariela Camacho in Austin, who creates pink Texas sheet cakes with heirloom Texas corn flour and prickly pear buttercream at Comadre Panadería. The cult pastries of 2024 go way beyond plain croissants and lofty blueberry muffins.

Women Are at the Helm

In New York, The Musket Room (led by chef Mary Attea and pastry chef Camari Mick) has maintained its Michelin star for a decade. Victoria Blamey now oversees the kitchen at Blanca, one of the city's most lauded tasting menu restaurants. Women now run many of the most highly awarded restaurants in the world. Among the contemporary, pioneering chefs south of the border are Pía León, the owner and chef of Kjolle in Lima; Janaína Torres, co-chef-owner of A Casa do Porco in São Paulo; and chef Elena Reygadas of Mexico City’s Rosetta—all awarded coveted slots on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, which marks a groundbreaking shift away from the male-dominated old guard.

Women also play a leading role in the current Parisian restaurant scene, where chicken heart skewers and Lebanese milk pudding are as much a part of the city's culinary fabric as steak frites and Paris-Brest. There’s Manon Fleury of the plant-forward Datil, where a largely female team dishes out remarkable seasonal dishes. And Eugénie Béziat, the first woman to helm the Michelin-starred Espadon inside the Ritz Paris. Women have always been instrumental in driving food culture. That they’re now receiving the praise and attention they deserve indicates a necessary, overdue change.

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You Get a Caesar and You Get a Caesar and You Get a Caesar…

It can feel like the Caesar salad has been a classic forever. The world’s most crave-worthy mountain of leaves, invented in Tijuana in 1924, celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, and its popularity just keeps growing. Along the way chefs have begun pushing the boundaries beyond the definitive equation of romaine-anchovies-croutons-parm. Vegan Caesars? Check. Caesars with chicories? Of course. If you can dream it, a chef has likely given it the Caesar salad treatment.

At the inventive Mexican restaurant Chilte in Phoenix, a summer Caesar incorporated frisée, jicama, crispy chicharron gremolata, queso cincho, and a chicatana Caesar dressing. In other cases, the Caesar riff isn’t even a salad at all, like at LA’s brand-new French restaurant Bar Etoile, where a Caesar beef tartare is served atop toasted, aioli-smeared sourdough. Few dishes pack the same tangy, creamy punch with so few base ingredients, making it the ideal canvas for chefs to showcase their unique points of view.

…And a Smash Burger to Go With It

Is there any love more powerful than that between Americans and their burgers? We love fast-food burgers, regional burgers, and, especially, in 2024, smash burgers. The paper-thin patties and pillowy buns have swept the nation and are now being infused with Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Italian flavors, among many others.

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One of our favorite restaurant dishes this year was the krapow smash burger at Little Grenjai in Brooklyn—a Thai spin featuring two crisp chile-laced beef-and-pork patties, melted American cheese, XO sauce, and Thai basil. The signature smash burger at Budoks Burgers, a roaming pop-up in San Francisco, consists of a beef and longanisa patty, a sauce of banana ketchup and calamansi, and an ube bun. And at Austin’s Lao’d Bar, a smashed Lao pork sausage patty is topped with jeow bong aioli slaw, rice-fermented pickles, bacon, and American cheese. The textural delight of a crispily caramelized smash burger has become a nationwide obsession. It’s only natural that chefs are intent on making it their own.

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit

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