Why High-End Restaurants Are Spinning Off More Casual Bar Version of Themselves
At a recent dinner at Gem Wine on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, my table was filled with raw scallops on crisp cabbage leaves, a griddled lobster-chanterelle sandwich, mackerel slivers on warm toasts, and smashed and fried lion’s-mane schnitzel. The small plates added up to a decent meal—and the kind of hefty bill that I’ve come to expect at a certain kind of beverage-focused not-quite restaurant: Including a dainty quenelle of corn ice cream and a bottle of Savagnin, I dropped close to $400.
But a 20-something in a Waffle House hoodie can just as easily leave the restaurant with a $28 tab. According to chef and owner Flynn McGarry, Gem Wine is an “in-between restaurant,” an acquiescence to the current mood for choose-your-own-adventure dining. “Guests have the option to not look at us as a restaurant,” he says.
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Not too long ago, at the same address, McGarry served 12-course tasting menus priced at $155—that is, before he temporarily closed Gem and transformed it into its current wine-bar iteration. Nearby, Bar Contra occupies real estate that once housed Contra, from Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, whose $180 tasting menus have been dispensed with in favor of stuffed chicken wings and modernist cocktails from Dave Arnold.
In Philadelphia, tasting-menu eatery Laurel is now wine bar Laurel, while Chicago’s Esmé developed an easier-going restaurant-within-a-restaurant, Bar Esmé. In New Orleans, the renovation of Emeril’s came with a sister wine bar. Back in New York, Angie Mar dropped the dress code and added burgers to the bar menu at Le B, formerly known as Les Trois Chevaux. This isn’t to suggest that fine dining is dead—it’s just showing its looser, more relaxed side.
Check the booking platform Resy and you can probably snag a same-day reservation at Eleven Madison Park, where Daniel Humm recently gutted two of his private dining rooms to make way for Clemente Bar. Three years after the landmark restaurant went vegan, the EMP team says their guests skew younger and more diverse and they felt the demand to create a more accessible experience—hence the new art-filled spaces, designed for cocktails and snacks à la fried tofu dogs, and a tasting counter with a speedy 90-minute set menu and drink pairings.
There’s a lot swirling in the restaurant ether that got us to this moment—and the massive popularity of appetite-killing weight-loss meds like Ozempic isn’t much of a factor, chefs say. Just an overdue recalibration of what constitutes luxury versus excess; omakase counters are thriving, after all. But it has become clear to many in the restaurant business that the tasting-menu landscape is oversaturated. Diners have grown weary of eating for hours on end, sometimes until they’re nearly sick.
Chefs also needed a break from their meticulously tweezered work. Stone and von Hauske Valtierra opened Contra in 2013 with a $55 set menu served on Ikea plates and paired with natural wines. But accolades brought in clientele accustomed to fine china and polished service, so Contra upgraded its service ware, added courses, and gradually raised the price to $180. “Everyone who’s worked for me has said that Contra has been the most fulfilling [but] difficult job,” says Stone. “That’s because it was nonstop. It takes a lot out of you.”
The pressure didn’t relent until the pandemic shuttered the restaurant, but it was that turmoil that steeled Stone to take reputational risks. Contra could either get even fancier and remain the center of his universe or revert to something simpler that would allow him and von Hauske Valtierra to grow their business sustainably. They chose the latter.
Demographic shifts are also a factor. During lockdown, many loyal tasting-menu patrons relocated outside city centers, and some of those who took their places don’t seem to have the same spending power. “People want to experience things they can’t afford—they want cheap [but] fancy,” says chef Jenner Tomaska, who introduced Bar Esmé’s $68 three-course menu after a successful restaurant week. That’s a steal compared to his $295 gunning-for-two-stars tasting menu at Esmé.
Young chef E. J. Lagasse reminded me that plenty of fine-dining restaurants have adjoining bars with drinks and snacks at the ready: Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm, Saga’s Crown Shy, the bar at EMP. That’s part of the reason he and his father, Emeril, installed a wine bar next to the remodeled 12-table dining room at Emeril’s. E. J. also didn’t want to produce tasting menus at volume, and the wine bar, he says, fits into the rhythms of New Orleans drinking culture. “You can drink an unbelievable ’96 Guigal La Turque with pâté en croûte and an order of barbecue shrimp,” he says. “It’s spur-of-the-moment. You didn’t have to book months in advance to enjoy the atmosphere, the service, the wine cellar, and the same products coming from a kitchen cooking this special tasting menu.”
In today’s culinary landscape, these ambitious but casual drop-in spaces are helping finance serious fine dining while building a following of younger guests who haven’t bought into tasting menus—yet. Lagasse, 21, and McGarry, 25, remain committed to the multicourse, highly orchestrated format. “It’s a great time to work on a fine-dining restaurant,” insists McGarry, who has a new restaurant planned for 2025. “What I’m working on now is: How do we become what EMP was to fine dining 15 years ago? How do we not get stuck in the same place?”
McGarry views his work at Gem Wine as market research. And he’s finding that people love the concept; the place is full every night. Now he just needs to translate what he has learned serving more casual fare to men wearing tank tops into the “next big thing.”
A few years ago, I sat in a joyless Michelin three-star restaurant. Despite smart, playful cooking, everyone around me ate in reverential near-silence. During that recent evening at Gem Wine, I could barely hear my husband above the din. I haven’t dined at Eleven Madison Park since it went vegan, but I will soon sip a Clemente martini with a tofu dog on the side, even if it’s not quite a meal. The new big thing in fine dining is more than a bar, not exactly a restaurant, and precisely what we need right now.
Caroline Hatchett is a James Beard Award–nominated writer and culture writer living in New York City.
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