The Big Idea: The New Era of Indulgence
Like the prestige TV dramas of yore, restaurants that wanted to be taken seriously have for decades made themselves deathly serious. Prizes were bestowed upon the establishments that embraced precision in culinary technique and service. But fun? Laughs? No. Merriment was for frivolous venues where the food was secondary to the scene.
Even before the pandemic, those lines had begun to blur as highly regarded chefs opened casual concepts that still produced well-crafted cuisine. But as Robb Report traveled across America this past winter and spring, visiting restaurants in the wake of the industry being battered by Covid-19 for two years, we sensed a new mood emerging. Offering exceptional cooking was no longer enough. If a restaurant’s business recipe didn’t include some joy and swagger amid an atmosphere of conviviality, it found itself noticeably emptier than those that did. This is not the moment for studied Nordic tasting menus. It is not the time for establishments to be lauded as the World’s Best while serving dishes that are more “interesting” than enjoyable to eat. This is the era for being indulged.
A populace starved for the once-routine act of going out wants to go big. Restaurants are more than willing to accommodate with theatrical tableside service and dishes that practically beg diners to break out their phones and broadcast the opulence of their outings on social media.
In one of Dallas’s hottest venues, Monarch, patrons are dressed to the nines on a Tuesday night, reveling in the $1,000 wood-fired Alaskan-king-crab feast. At the new West Hollywood hot spot Issima, the glamorous diners have no qualms about tearing apart a whole grilled sea bass with their hands to assemble DIY fish tacos. In San Francisco, a Michelin three-star chef has opened a more laid-back place, San Ho Won, where he’s serving glorious slabs of grilled beef to share among friends. In New York, at Les Trois Chevaux, a downtown answer to the temples of French gastronomy elsewhere in Manhattan, you don’t have to choose when it comes to dessert. The chef will automatically send your table everything on the menu.
And at tasting-menu restaurants, those that do find themselves full—even on school nights—are embracing a joie de vivre alien to the cathedrals of haute cuisine of the past. There are no exegeses of dishes in hushed tones at Tomo in Seattle, where chef Brady Williams, clad in a black T-shirt, crafts a creative prix fixe, while Houston’s March exudes charm from the design to the drinks.
After two years of pandemic cheerlessness, diners want a taste of the good life, and the best new restaurants in America are giving it to them.
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1. San Ho Won, San Francisco
Image Credit: Eric Wolfinger Chefs Corey Lee and Jeong-In Hwang call San Ho Won casual, but their attention to detail is anything but. This pair of fine-dining pros—Lee is chef-owner of Michelin three-star Benu, while Hwang’s an alum of top-notch restaurants on both sides of the Pacific—have taken their prodigious skills and devoted them to perfecting hearty dishes from their native Korea.
Their house double-cut galbi wholly sums up the duo’s approach. At first glance, it looks like the marinated short rib you might get at any decent Korean barbecue restaurant. However, upon closer inspection, the ribs are thicker, and the rich, tender meat easily peels away from the bone without falling apart. That’s no easy feat. But through extensive R&D, they’ve unlocked the best way to prepare the dish, cutting chunkier slabs than other restaurants serve, then braising them before finishing them on a grill that’s fueled by lychee-wood charcoal developed and manufactured specifically for the restaurant.
Lee and Hwang are also breaking with traditional Korean fare by drawing on influences from around their adopted hometown. So a piping-hot stew looks like a traditional kimchi jjigae when the roiling broth arrives at the table, but then along comes a plate of avocado, radish and fresh cilantro that would normally accompany Mexican posole. It’s their little nod to the heritage of San Francisco’s Mission District, where the restaurant resides. And like everything at San Ho Won, it’s a brilliantly executed dish that’s both comforting and creative.
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2. March, Houston
Image Credit: Courtesy of March Tasting-menu restaurants are a high-wire act. In the wrong hands, the procession of courses can feel like drudgery, the waitstaff robotic, the atmosphere self-serious and the over-manipulated food too precious. But when the service, food and design all align, the effect of a superior tasting-menu establishment can be transportive, enveloping you in its charm. That describes master sommelier June Rodil and chef Felipe Riccio’s March.
The latest from the team that lead Goodnight Hospitality (Peter and Bailey McCarthy are the other two partners) is a restaurant fully in control of itself. From the illustrations on the cocktail menu to the stylish sconces on the walls to the architectural garnishes on the drinks to the smart-but-not-obtrusive service to each table setting of china to, finally, every single course that comes out of the kitchen, March nails all the aesthetic details. As for the food, the restaurant focuses on the various cuisines around the Mediterranean and twice a year deep-dives into a specific subregion. So one menu may feature a lobster-and-octopus tart from Occitania in the South of France and another a bison carpaccio from Andalusia, Spain. But no matter its origins, every dish will be exceptional.
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3. Kasama, Chicago
Image Credit: Jeremy Repanich Kasama is two restaurants in one. By day, it’s a casual café serving Filipino-influenced fare, including longanisa-sausage breakfast sandwiches, chicken adobo with garlic rice and an array of delectable pastries such as ube-huckleberry Basque cake. At night, the married duo of Genie Kwon and Tim Flores turn that same space into a tasting-menu-only restaurant that takes traditional Filipino foods Flores ate growing up—think kinilaw (marinated raw fish), lumpia (fried spring rolls) and kare-kare (a peanut-based stew)—and transforms them into beautifully composed dishes.
Though Kasama debuted in July 2020, it was limited to patio service and take-out during the day and to-go orders at night. It didn’t fully come into its own until late last year, when pandemic restrictions eased, enabling it to open for dinner. Inside, the vibe feels more like an informal neighborhood spot, but what comes out of the kitchen is executed with a technical brilliance. And just as Kwon’s pastries are the best way to start a day, her desserts—such as halo-halo, which she renders with pandan ice cream, Asian-pear granita and leche flan—are the perfect end to an evening.
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4. Les Trois Chevaux, New York City
Image Credit: William Hereford When the Beatrice Inn closed in 2020, nearly a century of history went with it—but so did any obligation to recreate the heavy servings of red meat chef Angie Mar made famous there in recent years. At Les Trois Chevaux, the airy, intimate space she opened next door to the Beatrice last July, Mar is again both proprietor and chef but now prepares fish and fowl with the disciplined decadence the famed French chef Auguste Escoffier turned into a global standard in the late 19th century.
The seasonal menu blends elements of her own Chinese heritage and other Asian cultures with those French techniques. A light, refined foie-gras mille-feuille features Okinawa’s famed kokuto sugar and a subtle dose of white pepper, a staple in Chinese kitchens. The roasted duck breast is cured with cherry blossoms imported from Japan; the rendered fat is flavored with the tree’s bark and used in the preparation of the accompanying green lentils. It’s a flourish befitting the restaurant’s elegance—and its jacket requirement for gentlemen diners. If you’ve left yours at home, fret not: There’s a closet of vintage YSL awaiting anyone who arrives unprepared.
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5. Meridian, Dallas
Image Credit: Courtesy of Meridian At chef Junior Borges’s modern Brazilian restaurant, Meridian, he’s highlighting food from his childhood in Rio de Janeiro and then incorporating flavors from around Texas—and the world. So a plate of capicola and pickles comes with tapioca Brazilian cheese fritters that are chewy inside and perfectly crisp on the outside; quail is stuffed with foie gras and served with a jus made with the Brazilian guava paste goiabada; and there’s Texas Wagyu beef, but the steak on offer is the picanha, a cut that was first popularized in his native country.
At Meridian, Borges is taking the familiar and having fun with it. Restaurant menus are flooded with Little Gem Caesar salads, but he’s opted for a kohlrabi-based version. In Meridian’s rendition, ribbons of the German turnip offer a crisp and refreshing counterpoint to the anchovy-filled aioli they’re nestled in, while fresh mint leaves provide herbal punch to an already flavorful dish. It’s a testament to Borges that a salad could be this memorable.
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6. Horses, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Lucky Tennyson Horses is not trying to reinvent the wheel. That’s kind of the point. Chef-owners Liz Johnson and Will Aghajanian’s laid-back approach starts with the space itself. They didn’t build out an entirely new restaurant; instead, they replaced a gastropub, the Pikey, which shuttered in 2020. And before that, from 1937 to 2010, the building on Sunset Boulevard was home to Ye Coach & Horses, a Hollywood haunt where Richard Burton drank and Quentin Tarantino and Tim Roth scribbled scenes for Pulp Fiction on napkins. The chefs—a married couple whose joint résumé includes Noma and the Catbird Seat—gave the interiors a refresh but preserved the place’s vintage charm.
They kept the food classic, too. Johnson and Aghajanian enlisted two more co-chefs (Brittany Ha and Lee Pallerino) to create a menu with unfussy bistro fare that’s as comforting as it is delicious. There are nods to legends of California cuisine but certainly not slavish re-creations. The smoked salmon on lavash is an oblique reference to Spago’s beloved salmon pizza. And the Cornish game hen with dandelion panzanella is an ode to Zuni Café’s seminal roast chicken and bread salad. Perhaps most importantly, the Horses team has engineered a boisterous atmosphere that’s as much of a draw as the food. It’s hard to find another restaurant as brimming with life and energy as this one.
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7. Audrey, Nashville
Image Credit: Emily Dorio After helping redefine Southern cuisine at his restaurants in Charleston, S.C., Sean Brock has turned his font of creativity and curiosity toward Appalachia, with Nashville now his home base. Yet walking into Audrey, you can’t help but notice it also has a slight Danish accent. The design of the room—with its modern lines and gray walls offset by the warmth of wood details and foliage hanging from the ceiling—may be inspired by the American region, but it brings to mind some of Copenhagen’s finest dining establishments.
When the food arrives, though, it’s all Brock. The five-course menu unfurls with dishes such as a beet and black-walnut tart; Jimmy Red grits with hamachi and bay laurel; and, in a truly Brockian touch, a beautiful bowl filled with local greens, lettuces and edible flowers, finished at the table when a server pours a little carafe of hot ham fat all over it. As seriously as Brock takes his food, the restaurant remains relaxed and unpretentious, to the point where the waitstaff jokes that the thinly sliced sheet of cured meat with sorghum that arrives draped over an elevated wood dowel is the “Salvador Dalí ham.”
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8. Tomo, White Center, Washington
Image Credit: Kyle Johnson Never has a Robb Report best new restaurant been located next to an adult-video store. Until now. Tomo chef-owner and James Beard Award winner Brady Williams left one of Seattle’s most storied and picturesque restaurants, Canlis, and relocated to a rough-hewn neighborhood that doesn’t actually belong to a city, because Seattle has refused to annex it. But Williams and his team bring a youthful energy to this little stretch of unincorporated King County with a style of inventive and unfussy cooking that feels right at home in its environs.
Williams serves an ever-changing five-course tasting menu that’s inspired by his grandmother’s Japanese heritage and brimming with Pacific Northwest ingredients. He also shows off his facility for coaxing flavor out of vegetables, with a root-vegetable aguachile, in which the earthiness of beets is elevated by strawberries, while the carrots have a meaty chew. The bowl of mayocoba beans shines with squid, tuna-heart bottarga and a dusting of vadouvan. And his sunchoke-and-salsify dish is heightened by a yuzu béarnaise. If he keeps this up, Seattle may choose to annex White Center after all.
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9. Mena, New York City
Image Credit: Courtesy of Mena There’s not a single bite of food at Mena that won’t transport you. Simply finding the entrance to chef Victoria Blamey’s new restaurant, perched on a corner of Cortlandt Alley at the edge of Chinatown and Tribeca, is a little bit of an adventure—perhaps even for the downtown darlings who’ve pounded the pavement here before.
But as soon as you’re ensconced in one of the blue-chenille booths in this narrow, airy dining room, Blamey takes you on a culinary journey. A ceviche, whose squash leche de tigre will briefly set your mouth on fire, nods to Blamey’s native Chile. A light (and enlightened) take on chou farci, or stuffed cabbage, filled with scallop mousse and sea lettuce, is of French origin but also suggestive of West Africa. If you’re desiring something heartier, the Spanish lentils served under a bed of fried trumpet-mushroom chips have more weight and just as much nuance. The roast pheasant leg is playfully presented with a feather—an ironic adornment that suggests Blamey is finally, after stints at restaurants where she couldn’t fully spread her wings, having fun being her own boss. Lucky are the diners who get to come along for the ride.
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10. Callie, San Diego
Image Credit: Lucianna McIntosh Great chefs get pretty excited by high-quality ingredients. No surprise there. But Travis Swikard’s enthusiasm for Southern California’s bounty—especially around San Diego—is hard to match. At his debut restaurant, the native San Diegan is practically an ambassador for the food grown and raised nearby. The uni that’s perched atop house-made bread and Ibérico ham is sourced not from Hokkaido or Santa Barbara but nearby Point Loma. And the spot prawn, garlic, chili and parsley hail from along the local coast.
Swikard views his SoCal ingredients through the lens of Mediterranean cooking, filling his menu with dishes from across the region. Among his most memorable: light and airy taramasalata accompanied by briny dill chips; beef tartare served with black harissa and labneh; and a squid-ink bucatini with calamari and Calabrian-chili sofrito. But his Aleppo chicken can’t be missed. It’s tender and juicy and served with sumac pickles, yogurt and coriander honey, offering a subtle floral quality with hints of black licorice. Throughout a dinner at Callie, Swikard proves himself a chef adept at balancing bold flavors.
