Why Middle-Aged Restaurants Matter the Most
This writing may feel a little unc-ish, but I’ll own that.
Last week, I opened paid subscriptions. You can upgrade if you’d like to support my work. I’m pulling together some live streams that will have a subscriber-only component. Those will be fun. Also, the Founding Member subscription includes an annual meeting with me, which can take place over Zoom or IRL in New York or Los Angeles. If you’re looking for an hour of consulting, trendspotting, or conversation, you know the button to push.
On a recent episode of This Is TASTE, I had a spirited conversation with Matthew Schneier, the chief restaurant critic at New York magazine, that brought us back to a topic I’ve talked about a bunch on the show and that was finally fully clarified. We were in the weeds discussing Schneier’s best restaurants list from December. His 43-restaurant guide was such a joy to read. Like all great restaurant critics, Schneier’s take on the city was packed with backhanded compliments (“Torrisi Overcomes Its Own Ridiculousness”) as well as openhearted praise (the dude knows and loves Persian food and calls Eyval a “masterpiece”).
But I wasn’t the most excited to talk about the new places. It wasn’t the Zimmis and the Kabawas that got my juices going, but the places he’d dusted off: Coppelia, Thai Diner, the Modern—the latter a place with a James Beard Awards party bus roster of alumni yet so out of the discourse that I had to look up the chef (it’s Thomas Allan, who has been running the kitchen since 2020). These are restaurants that opened to serious buzz, landed great press, and then evaporated from the conversation—not because they got worse but because the conversation moved on.
That’s when Schneier reached for a phrase that I think is going to stick. There’s a real “middle class of restaurants,” he said, “or maybe ‘middle age of restaurants’ is even more to the point.” Bullseye. These are places that have fallen down in the rankings and the algorithms, he said, but that are in many cases executing better versions of themselves than they did when they were first finding their place within the Resy scroll. Later in the same conversation, talking about a visit to Little Dom’s in Los Angeles, he came back to the concept again. I talk about this all the time on the show—that we need to go to these “middle-aged” restaurants (it’s such a great term), because they don’t get to the geriatric age without support.
Schneier said it well: “If you want great restaurants to endure, if you want them to make it to the sort of grand old age that some of our great historic New York restaurants attain, you’ve got to keep going to them. And in many cases, they get better and better, sometimes after the klieg light of early attention has moved along.”
The “klieg light of early attention.” That’s the whole thing.
I’ve been working in and around food media for twenty years, and the machine is very good at one thing: new openings. The surge in demand for reservations while awaiting the first big review from NY Mag or the NYT. The early preview writing (or IG post or Substack mention) filed from a still-shaky restaurant that hasn’t found its footing yet. I’m certainly part of this infrastructure. I visited the new Babbo less than a month in (I liked it), and I recently visited Eddie Huang’s new Baohaus on St. Marks Place during week two—which was after Schneier’s visit on day two. We both clearly had our own motivations. I wanted to support Eddie and had visited the Flower Shop a few weeks prior. Eddie is working. Schneier simply had a great story to file, and news is news.
We, the media, show up at the very moment when a place is least itself, and we write about it like we’ve seen the place fully formed. And then we move on, because there is always something newer to report on. The cycle can feel relentless, and if I’m being real, it doesn’t always serve the reader. The biggest problem of all is that the readers follow us writers. Too many diners are treating these new restaurants like trophies, and I’m sure there’s a new recommendation app start-up that will hand out actual digital trophies for visiting new restaurants. Think of that Yahoo Fantasy Football trophy case that we all like to revisit often.
Before moving ahead, there’s a myth that needs clarification: that 90 percent of restaurants fail in the first year. It’s not true. According to the Commerce Institute, more than 82 percent of businesses in food service survive the first turn of the calendar, though only half of all restaurants make it past the five-year mark—which is what I’ll define as middle age. That means getting there is legitimately difficult, and that’s why it’s so important to give places like the Modern (and the others on the list below) a second look, and a third. In year three, the kitchen has found its rhythm. The chef has stopped doing the podcasts and sweating the food writers taking their comped meals and started really cooking. The restaurant has its server rotation figured out, and there are actual regulars. None of this can exist on opening night. It truly takes years.
After Schneier coined this term, I came to the realization that these middle-aged restaurants can feel invisible—too old to be news, too young to be history. Yet the middle-aged restaurant is forming the connective tissue of a thriving food city. A great restaurant like Boerum Hill’s French Louie (opened in 2014) is what makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood: a place that’s doing the work without anyone watching.
What Schneier was intentionally doing with his list was pushing back a bit on the idea of the hotlist-ification of dining out. “It was a real point of focus,” he told me, “to spotlight places that, when you read them on the list, you thought, ‘Oh my god, yeah, of course, that place. I love that place. I haven’t thought about it because I’ve been distracted by the bright, shiny new baubles.’” A food media landscape that only rewards new openings teaches restaurants to chase hype instead of durability. It engenders a city full of restaurants that are very possibly incredible for six months—but that then collapse under the weight of their own press, because nobody came back.
Schneier mentioned, kind of as an aside, that maybe his investment in all of this is personal. “Maybe it’s just that I am middle-aged now,” he joked, “and so I’ve taken on the responsibility of speaking for my cohort.” I felt seen. And I keep thinking about it, because I’m 45, and I think he’s exactly right. To care about the middle-aged restaurant is not only to care about the perfectly dialed in socca I’ve ordered a dozen times at French Louie but to care about a place that has developed a style of dining over time. So I’m not driven by the first lines written from the desk of Flo Fab but more by supporting the seasoned veteran.
It’s true that this point of view is informed by eating my way through a city for 25 years, and it’s also true that a 22-year-old may just want more Beli cred than anything else. Fair. This writing may feel a little unc-ish, and I’ll own that. But whether you’re young or less young, I’d encourage you to test yourself the next time you are scrolling through Resy. Go back to a restaurant you haven’t thought about in three years. Order what you always ordered. See who’s still cooking. My guess is that something has changed. My guess is it might be for the better.
I stretched to make a list of middle-aged restaurants (and older) that I both like and think are important to support. Some of these places are quite popular and even buzzy, though that can all change in the blink of an eye. Here’s a start for NYC and Los Angeles. List your own picks in the comments.
NEW YORK CITY
Dirt Candy (Lower East Side; opened 2008, current location opened 2015)
Superiority Burger (East Village; opened 2015, current location opened 2023)
Her Name Is Han (Koreatown; opened 2015)
Toloache (Midtown; opened 2007)
Hearth (East Village; opened 2003)
Sofreh (Prospect Heights; opened 2018)
Estela (Nolita; opened 2013)
Russ & Daughters Cafe (Lower East Side; opened 2014)
Roberta’s (Bushwick; opened 2008)
Veselka (East Village; opened 1954)
Lilia (Williamsburg; opened 2016)
Gramercy Tavern (Flatiron; opened 1994)
Cosme (Flatiron; opened 2014)
Motorino (East Village; opened 2008, current location opened 2009)
Lure Fishbar (SoHo; opened 2004)
Gertrude’s (Prospect Heights; opened 2023)
LOS ANGELES
Majordomo (Chinatown; opened 2018)
Gjelina (Venice; opened 2008)
Ruen Pair (Thai Town; opened 1996)
Soban (Koreatown; opened 2010)
Anajak Thai (Sherman Oaks; opened 1981)
Langer’s Deli (MacArthur Park; opened 1947)
Bestia (Arts District; opened 2012)
Sqirl (Virgil Village; opened 2011)
Night + Market Song (Silver Lake; opened 2014)
Guelaguetza (Koreatown; opened 1994)
Gjusta (Venice; opened 2014)
République (Hancock Park; opened 2013)
Bavel (Arts District; opened 2018)
Kato (Arts District; opened 2016, current location opened 2022)
Jon & Vinny’s (Fairfax; opened 2015)
Kismet (Los Feliz; opened 2017)
Rustic Canyon (Santa Monica; opened 2006)
Osteria Mozza (Hollywood; opened 2007)
New York Times reporter Julia Moskin joined me on This Is TASTE to go over her blockbuster reporting on abuse at Noma, and we talked details (some new). I believe the podcast format is the best way to get the full story as well as hear the real nuance. I appreciate Julia taking the time to chat with me. We discussed:
✔️ New details about the abuse, and a timeline of violence in the kitchen that extended to the 2020s
✔️ Tackling the “fine dining is just that way” mentality, and talking through the mixed response from the industry
✔️ How to report (or not report) on people posting ❤️🔥🎇 in René’s social posts
✔️ The complications (or lack thereof) for Noma LA ticket holders
✔️ Forced silence in the fine-dining kitchen as “a form of tyranny”
✔️ Techno at Noma 🙅🏻
LISTEN: Julia Moskin Broke the Noma Story, and Possibly Broke Noma
This is my favorite genre of restaurant, mainly because it's nice to actually have a prayer of getting a reservation. I adore Lure and Gramercy Tavern. In Brooklyn I would add Insa, Misi, Vinegar Hill House, Sawa, and Inga's to the list. Also Libertine in Manhattan!
Well-said. Great topic and stellar lists. Follow-up questions: At what point does a middle-aged restaurant become an institution? After a decade? 20 years? And what does a middle-aged restaurant become if not an institution? A classic? Tired? Retired?