10 Dynamic Restaurants That Broke the Rules of Fine Dining and Defined the Decade

Momofuku Empire, multiple cities

David Chang Inc. is a thriving concern. It stretches from fine dining to fast casual to home goods to the coolest of neighborhoods to the lamest of mega-malls to podcasts to Netflix to eventually Hulu. You can find the 42-year-old chef in so many places because he’s a populist at heart. “He’s a seeker,” says chef Matty Matheson. “There are people who are seeking the inner truth of what makes them happy, and they’re trying to balance, ‘How can I be happy by making other people happy—but without compromising?’” That searching has fueled Chang’s empire.

“It feels very inclusive. Momofuku is accessible in terms of price points. It’s accessible in terms of appealing to different age groups of people who get what the food is about,” says Corey Lee of Benu in San Francisco. “Those are the key things people were looking for this last decade—for restaurants to be more inclusive and accessible. It’s a very different kind of restaurant than the ones we’d tended to talk about in decades prior.”

Of course, what Chang started began in the aughts, when he opened Noodle Bar and then Ssäm Bar in New York’s East Village. It was akin to punk emerging nearby in the 1970s: Chang stripped everything away to reveal what was really important. Gone were the tablecloths and stuffiness of fine dining, but the quality of the food remained. Throughout the industry, this high-low mix spread far and wide. “David Chang opening Momofuku changed the way we all experience restaurants now,” says Michael Solomonov of Zahav in Philadelphia. “It was like casual but also really high end. I think the way that we describe our restaurant is fine dining but disguised as casual. The standards are all the same, but service is more relaxed. It’s okay to get great service from people with T-shirts, and it’s okay to play loud music, and it’s okay to take away the rules of what was traditionally supposed to be high end.”

Chang didn’t just influence the format of restaurants; he expanded our palates as well. “Momofuku put Asian food on the map,” says Mei Lin of Nightshade in Los Angeles. “It shaped what Asian food is today by breaking it down into a language we can all understand.”

And yet the empire’s growth wasn’t all smooth sailing. His rise was slightly stymied by a few setbacks, including a rough reception for his Italian concept Nishi, but he took a cash injection that spurred Momofuku to be the model of a growing restaurant group.

The influence of the restaurants hasn’t stopped. With Majordomo in LA, he has embraced the spectacle and fun of large-format dining, going beyond his big bo ssäm pork shoulder to slicing a $190-plate short rib tableside on a giant cart or having a server cascade raclette off a huge wheel of cheese into a Le Creuset filled with beef. A Las Vegas outpost is set to open at the end of the year. Chang started the decade by showing the food world the power of stripping back creature comforts to discover what mattered in a meal, and he ends the decade by celebrating a bit of the showmanship that makes going out to eat with friends more of an event.

Asador Etxebarri, Axpe, Spain

In a decade marked by a return to naturalism, with foraged ingredients and less manipulated plating styles, a self-taught cook in Spain’s Basque country harnessed the primitive power of live-fire cooking. Across a wall in Asador Etxebarri’s kitchen are six custom grills that chef Victor Arguinzoniz can raise and lower independently with the spin of a wheel. It gives him the control to cook over fire with finesse, from prawns gently kissed with smoke to a bone-in beef chop with a healthy char.

“I walked away from that meal feeling like the fire was the method and an ingredient. It’s so nuanced in the food,” says Ashley Christensen, who opened her wood-fired restaurant, Death & Taxes, in 2015. “For one dish, when it’s in season, you’re eating this little bowl of wood-fired baby eels, and the fire is used to celebrate the texture and the flavor of them. That was the first time I got that feeling of ‘This is someone who is taking this thing—the fire—and bending it around ingredients,’ and that’s a unique way of thinking.”

“Etxebarri brought a new dimension to cooking with fire and brought it around the world,” says Aithor Zabala of Somni in Beverly Hills. “How many chefs put grills in their kitchen because Etxebarri has them?”

Eleven Madison Park, New York

When Eleven Madison Park opened, Danny Meyer had no grand plans to make it the top-ranked restaurant in the world. For starters, that award didn’t exist way back in 1998, but also EMP was a more populist affair: a brasserie serving 400 people a night rather than the fine-dining destination it would become, seating only 80 people each evening. That transformation began in earnest when Daniel Humm and Will Guidara purchased the restaurant from Meyer in 2011.

Not long after the duo closed the deal, the restaurant leaped from one Michelin star to three and started marching up the World’s 50 Best list. In 2017, it became only the second American restaurant (after the French Laundry) to take the No. 1 spot. Yet a key aspect of Eleven Madison Park’s ascendance—the thing that makes it a defining restaurant of the decade—actually made it atypical for the first half of the 2010s.

For a time, EMP was swimming against the tide. In the wake of the financial crisis, fine dining seemed to be receding, and so-called fine casual was gaining a foothold. The buzziest restaurants stripped back service, but Will Guidara carried the torch. “He’s that hospitality guy sitting around a table brainstorming about how you can take it one step further,” says Kevin Boehm, cofounder of Boka Restaurant Group in Chicago. “He’s not just going to be good at the core competencies of service—he wants to blow people’s minds.” Guidara approached white-tablecloth service in a more playful way, with tableside service, “dreamweavers” who created intensely personal touches for guests and sometimes even three-card-monte games. “The dreamweavers are like little CIA agents figuring out things about people before they even come, which can create ungodly experiences.”

Sure, other restaurants weren’t copying the dreamweavers, but they eventually recognized they needed to take a page out of EMP’s book. Because as the decade wore on, diners had a wealth of choices for great places to eat, and ambitious restaurants had to pay as much attention to the dining room as they did to the kitchen. “I think that’s why you see more people doing more tableside service, and people started paying attention to the little details of dining,” von Hauske says. “He set the tone for wanting to be front of house again, instead of people just wanting to be chefs.”

Sqirl, Los Angeles

“The audience of foodies in America has been built,” says Matthew Accarrino of SPQR in San Francisco. “So you had people who weren’t okay with two sad scrambled eggs and toast in the morning anymore. They wanted to go have something more interesting.” This was the decade when people got exactly that: Across the country, from Atla and West~Bourne in New York to Milktooth in Indianapolis, London Plane in Seattle, Gjusta in LA and many more in between, the most important meal of the day actually started living up to its name.

An oft-imitated exemplar of the form is Sqirl, founded by Jessica Koslow. After learning from Anne Quatrano in Atlanta, finding inspiration from a year working in Melbourne and shaking off a dalliance in television production, she started a jam company in 2011. That grew into a café serving just breakfast and lunch. And soon a perpetual line formed around the corner of a nondescript block in East Hollywood.

With the bounty of Southern California produce at her disposal, Koslow breathed new life into California cuisine by combining it with what’s great about Australian brekkie culture (hello, avocado toast!). The juxtaposition created the ideal dishes for the decade of “I want to eat healthy . . . but not too healthy.” The food is a mixture of fresh, fermented and sharply acidic, complex yet approachable and comforting, like her sorrel pesto grain bowl with feta and lacto-fermented hot sauce. And at a time when carbs seemed verboten, she got skinny LA hipsters to devour giant slabs of brioche topped with ricotta and strawberry-rose-geranium jam.

“You saw people like Jessica at Sqirl and Travis [Lett] at Gjusta take on a restaurant that wasn’t a bakery and it wasn’t a diner,” Accarrino says. “We started to see a focus away from the idea that a serious chef could only operate a dinner-only restaurant.”

Roberta’s and Blanca, Brooklyn

During the first half of this decade, in the way that Seattle became a global shorthand for cool in the early 1990s, Brooklyn was more than just a borough—it was a cultural force. As the economy faltered in the lead-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis, artisans across Brooklyn were making their own bean-to-bar chocolate, canning pickles, opening old-timey butcher shops and forging knives. It was a time of feral facial hair and impossible coolness.

The Brooklyn craft moment grew out of a rejection of mass-produced, factory-made products in favor of pre-industrial methods. A DIY aesthetic shot through the bars and restaurants coming up at that time, because the neighborhoods were not yet flooded by an influx of development dollars. The borough had the advantage of being adjacent to the power, wealth and media of the city, but brownstone Brooklyn still existed on a human scale in a way that the towers of Manhattan did not. And so humans—self-funded ones like Brandon Hoy and Carlo Mirarchi of Roberta’s—could open a restaurant on their own and still have enough wealthy people nearby to support a Michelin two-star tasting menu at Blanca.

Roberta’s began when a couple of musicians—Chris Parachini and Hoy—started a restaurant on a blighted block in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. When it started running out of money, Mirarchi chipped in $30,000 to join the project and said he wanted to be the chef. In 2008, they cobbled together enough cash to go to a lumberyard and start building a space with communal seats and Christmas lights. They served wood-fired pizza and eventually more. Blanca, the tasting counter, launched in the same cinder-block-filled compound a few years later. At both places, Mirarchi developed a style that was Italian in philosophy, in which he focused intently on creating dishes around individual ingredients without overcomplicating them. The place filled with people from the surrounding neighborhoods and foodies on a mission from Manhattan.

“I worked as a chef in Williamsburg from 2010 to 2014, and Roberta’s was the epitome of cool,” says Andy Doubrava of Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, Calif. “He had his pizzeria and then his Michelin-starred place, and that’s what every chef wanted. We all talked about it. We all went there together to eat. The servers were, like, kind of douche-y but in a cool way where you wanted to be friends with them. Everything about it was perfect.”

Eventually, the wider world noticed, too. From Ireland to Chile, knockoff versions proliferated. A line of frozen pizzas appeared in New York supermarkets. Mirarchi transcended the food media, appearing in the pages of Vogue and GQ. And by the end of the decade, like so many New Yorkers, Roberta’s moved to a nicer neighborhood in Los Angeles. What sums up the 2010s better than that?

Pujol, Mexico City

It’s a well-known story in the food world. A 24-year-old Enrique Olvera returned to Mexico City with a degree in hand from the Culinary Institute of America, and after cooking food through a European lens, he decided he needed to cook the food of Mexico, exemplified by the mole he serves with handmade tortillas. “Enrique took really, really traditional Mexican cooking and made a 2.0 elevated version and presented it in a rustic, elegant, modern way,” says Zabala.

“Olvera has done so much to expose the rest of the world to his country’s cuisine—as much as René [Redzepi] has for Scandinavian cuisine,” says Gary “the Foodie” Okazaki, one of the most well-traveled diners around. This decade, you saw people explore the food cultures of their own corners of the world, including  Sean Brock in the American South, Virgilio Martinez and Pia Leon in Peru, Vladimir Mukhin in Russia, Rodolfo Guzman in Chile, Sean Sherman with Native American cuisine and more.

“The trend in food now is to turn toward your own roots—your ingredients, your flavors,” says Gabriela Cámara of Contramar, Cala and Onda. “It’s about losing the fear of appreciating comfort foods that are close to your heart.”

Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pocantico Hills, NY

This decade, you couldn’t swing a dead free-range chicken without hitting a restaurant claiming to be farm-to-table. We say “claiming” because, as the 2010s wore on, “farm-to-table” became more marketing speak than reality for many restaurants (as the Tampa Bay Times showed pretty convincingly in its 2016 investigative series “Farm to Fable”). Yet there remained many outstanding restaurants doing the actual hard work of farm-to-table cooking, and Dan Barber has been a beacon of the movement.

Barber opened the original Blue Hill in New York’s Greenwich Village in 2000, and the restaurant at the Blue Hill agricultural center debuted in 2004, 30 miles north of the city. In those early years, his style of restaurant—one that’s intensely connected to the land—wasn’t as en vogue as the whizbang science of the molecular gastronomists. But as the modernist movement faded, the culinary pendulum swung back in Barber’s direction.

“Dan Barber’s approach to everything that goes into what makes a great meal—agriculture, harvesting and animal husbandry—is above and beyond finding a good vendor or teaming up with a local farm,” says Ray Garcia of Broken Spanish in Los Angeles. “The restaurant is a place to showcase the bigger impact he’s having.” Stone Barns is also an agricultural center, focused on growing better produce and promoting sustainable agriculture and then expressing it at the restaurant through dishes that may be as simple as raw vegetables lovingly arrayed to start a meal. “What’s happening at Blue Hill, it’s curiosity of ingredient and a curiosity of how to develop flavor through developing varieties of ingredients that are flavor-driven,” Koslow says.

That’s where Barber has also taken farm-to-table to a whole new level. He realized our food system is largely created to produce food that’s meant to be more shelf-stable than delicious, so he’s been working to create seeds and growing conditions that optimize flavor. “There was this kind of  strange, very counterintuitive gap between what chefs want to cook and what farmers were growing,” Corey Lee says. “And he started the dialogue where farmers are actually changing what they’re growing so that they’re providing chefs with what they want to cook.”

Le Chateaubriand and Le Dauphin, Paris

Close your eyes and take yourself back in time to 2004, and then let the phrase “wine bar” pass through your thoughts. What do you see? Perhaps an assortment of wine flights with names like “Bad Ass Reds,” a tiny plate of bacon-wrapped dates, some questionable-looking flatbreads and maybe even some unfortunate wide-leg pants? This was the decade when that model was blown out of the water.

What came to define some of the world’s very best natural-wine bars is that they were run by serious chefs wanting to open a more casual and convivial spot by their flagship restaurants. In New York, Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske launched Wildair and Contra, Copenhagen has Christian Puglisi’s Manfreds and Relae, and San Francisco features Verjus, opened by Michael Tusk down the street from his Michelin three-star Quince. The epicenter of the movement, Paris, has multiple iterations of the trend: Frenchie and its Bar a Vins, Septime and La Cave and, of course, Le Dauphin wine bar right next to Le Chateaubriand.

The seeds for the natural-wine-bar movement were sown by both chefs and vintners in France. A scattering of French wine producers began creating light, fresh, lower-alcohol, acidic wines made with minimal intervention in the vineyards and minimal sulfur in the production. It was an affront to an old guard that favored big, full-bodied wines—the kind racking up points from Robert Parker. And as people began to feel dissatisfied with Michelin three-star dining, the city’s culinary energy moved to bistros, with the “bistronomy” movement standing against the grand palaces of gastronomy. Inside smaller, more casual restaurants chefs cooked with creativity. “It was a lot of fun food—it was not as stuffy,” says Yves’s Alex Baker, who used to cook at Daniel Rose’s Spring in Paris. “Chateaubriand started that movement, and you saw other young chefs opening little spots and taking themselves less seriously.”

Those threads converged at Iñaki Aizpitarte’s Le Chateaubriand, where he prepares a relatively affordable tasting menu cooked without overly expensive ingredients. “He just cooks in a way where there’s seemingly almost no influence from other restaurants or other chefs,” says Jeremiah Stone of Wildair and Contra. “It’s no apologies. It’s not because he’s not aware. But you get a lot of dishes that are kind of polarizing and challenging.”

In 2010 he opened Le Dauphin next door in a space created by starchitect Rem Koolhaas. Despite the pedigree of the design, the food is casual, with shareable plates ranging from ham to squid-ink risotto to crab-stuffed potatoes. But perhaps most importantly, the two restaurants combined gave a big platform to the natural wines being created in France and beyond.

The Grey, Savannah, Ga.

For many people, prior to the 2010s, the idea of Southern food conjured up visions of Paula Deen dumping a few pounds of butter into a vat of gravy and calling it a day, y’all. That—for so, so, so many reasons—is completely wrong. But it took a dedicated collection of chefs throughout the region to move beyond stereotypes and start earning the cuisine the due it deserved. Chefs like Sean Brock at Husk and McCrady’s and Frank Stitt at Highlands Bar and Grill elevated Southern fare in the eyes of the food cognoscenti.

But even as the food’s reputation was burnished, a part of the story was left out. “When I Googled ‘best Southern chef,’ there were probably, like, 20 chefs up there, and none of them was of color,” says Edouardo Jordan of Salare and JuneBaby in Seattle. “It was just shocking to me. It was like this slew of Southern restaurants that were coming up, this big trend of Southern food, and there was no one of color truly talking about the food from their perspective, in their eyes.”

That matters, because so much of what feels quintessential about Southern-American food—things like okra, gumbo or the red beans in Hoppin’ John—are actually African. And yet those details and the contributions of African-Americans have been left out of the history books. This decade, chefs began to reinstate them.

In Savannah, Ga., Mashama Bailey and her business partner have converted an old Greyhound Station built in the Jim Crow South into the Grey—a reclamation of a once-segregated space. Inside, Bailey cooks what she calls Port City Southern food: a cuisine that’s rooted in Southern ingredients but not closed off from the world that has passed through this old coastal town. Bailey draws on her lived experience of eating food from her grandmother’s kitchen in Georgia along with training in New York and France. She’s channeled the likes of Edna Lewis and has gone deep into the terroir and ingredients of the land around her. The result is a trip through cultures—like grits topped with foie gras, quail with creole sauce or the Low Country rice dish perloo with okra. It’s the story of the region and also of America.

Noma, Copenhagen

At the core of Noma, the defining restaurant of the 2010s, is a kernel of the place that defined the 2000s: a restaurant where René Redzepi once worked. “Ferran [Adria] left a mark that’s going to stay in kitchens forever,” Redzepi says, “and that can be difficult to grasp, because everyone is going to think about jellies and foams. But what it was really about was thinking. Looking at things differently is the biggest thing El Bulli left for us at Noma.”

And for Redzepi, rethinking meant seeing luxury outside of the obvious fine-dining trappings like quenelles of caviar or shavings of truffle or big lobes of seared foie gras. Luxury is the ability to find a mushroom in season for three weeks and serve it at its absolute height. Or experiment extensively with fermentation to expand the flavors at a cook’s disposal. “Noma is so revolutionary because they’re using time to bring flavor into dishes,” Koslow says.

The revolution was comprehensive, extending beyond just the foraging and the fermentation. “Noma was very influential in food and restaurant aesthetics,” Corey Lee says. “If you look at that shift from something that looked very manipulated—that defied the normal kinds of cooking—to something that was all about being very natural and organic, almost like it was unearthed from somewhere, I associate that shift with Noma.” As it topped the World 50 Best Restaurants list four times, the look and feel of the restaurant were knocked off as much as the food, but a larger message has endured even after the fervor around New Nordic faded.

“I will argue that René’s food is actually more influential than El Bulli’s was,” says Alex Stupak of Empellon in New York. “That’s not an insult—El Bulli change my life. It’s just that not everyone needs a liquid-filled doodad. There are very few restaurants that have those creative needs. René taught us we should only be cooking of a place, of what grows around us, and we should be discovering those things and finding value in them.”