A Rare Year in Dining
A look at dining in 2025 and a glimpse of what's ahead
This Thanksgiving was the first one my 90-year-old nana didn’t host. There was no ceremony to the shift, no official passing of the torch, just a quiet acknowledgment that she needed a rest. Still, the absence was unmistakable. I didn’t realize how much her table set the tone for the holiday: the archival adorned plates, the tartness of her salad dressing that always hit the table first, the faint Worcestershire note in her blue cheese dip that somehow tasted exactly like the holidays.
We ended up talking about her recipes more than usual this year. Not just the dressings and dips, but the apple pie where the crust is coated with cinnamon sugar apple juice, the cheesecake she insists must cool on the counter for hours untouched, the rugelach that’s laced with cooled over apricot jam and raisins running along the folded pastry edges. She’s reached the age where she wants these things written down, passed on, preserved. Her legacy of recipes memorized. The little ingredients I never noticed — the pinch of this, the splash of that — suddenly felt like clues to something larger.
When I returned to New York, I found myself paying closer attention to my own small, ordinary rituals. The spicy olive oil that sat untouched on my counter for three years, a Secret Santa gift I’d nearly forgotten about, became my new morning habit on avocado toast. The tomato candle burning on my desk filled the apartment with a scent I didn’t realize I’d come to rely on. Even the fogged-up windows from the first real cold snap felt like part of some quiet routine I hadn’t noticed forming.
None of it was profound, but it made the year feel clearer in its quiet moments, the ones that usually slip by unnoticed unless something nudges you to look again.
This noticing, the slowing down, the quiet inventory of the everyday, helped make the rest of the year come into focus too. And when I finally stepped back, the patterns that made dining in 2025 what it was started to emerge...
WHAT DEFINED DINING IN 2025
Food in Coupes
In 2025, we reached peak “wrong vessel” maximalism. Coupes became the canvas for everything — desserts, seafood cocktails, savory bites, caviar piles, La Rai’s ice cream, La Cantine’s stuffed tiramisus — and the trend showed up everywhere, not just in restaurants. Dinner parties had butter coupes swirled like gelato and anything remotely spreadable or sculptable ended up in stemware. All photograph-worthy, gleefully unserious, and deeply of-the-moment.
The Martini Multiverse
Say what you want about the prolific Eugene Remm hotspots - The Corner Store and the Eighty Six (candidly, I haven’t been to either and don’t plan to fight my way in) - but it’s undeniable they set and pushed the martini trend forward into its extravagance era. Tomato martinis, caesar salad martinis, pickle martinis, table side martinis. Less about the drink, and more about the identity.
The Hot Dog Micro-Moment
A low-key trend, but a real one: chefs treated the hot dog like a canvas, not an afterthought. Elbow Ludlow ran weekly hot-dog pop-ups and Dominique Ansel’s newest brainchild, Papa d’Amour, spiraled theirs in laminated pastry.
Revival of the Fittest
Throwback became hot again? Babbo, Gertie, and the newly announced upcoming returns of both Maialino and Ugly Baby reminded us that continuity can be more exciting than reinvention.
Hyper-Specific Menus
NYC doubled down on single-obsession concepts - Salt Hank’s and the French Dip, Mary O’s and scones, Sunday Morning’s cinnamon roll universe, Danny and Coop’s Cheesesteak’s and their apex cheesesteaks (with celebrity backing). The charm is in the commitment: to do one thing, and do it beautifully and with conviction.
Dessertified Coffee & Matcha
Matcha and coffee blurred into dessert this year: brûléed tops, sweet-cream caps, layered textures, crunchy-cookie toppings, and more. The beverage-as-treat moment entered with full force. This wasn’t morning caffeine; it was dessert in a drinkable caffeinated format.
ENLY embraced cream-top indulgence with tiramisu coffee, while Montauk General Store fueled the matcha sweet-treat wave with collabs and over-the-top creations like matcha floats with Joan’s on Third, cornflake matcha latte, matcha affogatos with Chara and many more. And Blank Street took the whole aesthetic mainstream and maximalist: blondie lattes with brown-sugar caramel, cookie butter, miso, and every sweet drizzle imaginable.
It also tapped into the broader “sweet-treat” culture taking over, and the impulse to turn everything into a little dessert moment.
‘The Great Chickening’
According to Eater, we’re in the middle of what they call “the Great Chickening,” a moment where restaurants, from fast casual to natural-wine darlings, are embracing the simple truth that, as one owner put it, “everybody loves chicken.”
And in New York, the trend showed up in every form: Chez Fifi leaned luxe with its truffled roast chicken at a whopping $148 price-point, while the Thai Diner team opened Mommy Pai’s, a fast-casual spot built entirely around lemongrass- and coconut-seasoned chicken fingers where a combo meal comes out to $20 a pop.
2025 proved that chicken wasn’t the fallback this year, it was the feature.
Seafood Steakhouses
Seafood took on steakhouse energy: big-format fish, raw-bar drama, butter-drenched sauces, sides galore. Seahorse leaned into the genre, and Danny Garcia’s short-lived Time & Tide captured the same spirit.
Regional Depth
Some of the most interesting openings this year weren’t “Indian,” “American,” or “Thai” in the broad sense; they were precise, anchored, and deeply regional.
Smithereens tapped into New England coastal cooking; Kanyakumari brought South Indian coastal flavors that rarely surface in New York; and Narkara pushed Northern and Northeastern Thai dishes into focus, a sharp break from the city’s usual “central Thai” shorthand.
Not categories but places. A shift toward food with a mapped identity that’s distinct, authentic, and where every dish has intentionality and comes to life through a story.
WHAT’S AHEAD — 2026 PREDICTIONS
Snack-Forward Wine Bars
Over the last several years, wine bars have blurred into restaurants with wine-forward menus full of composed plates and bites disguised as entrees, but I think we will start to see the pendulum swing back in 2026. The clearest early signal comes from Stars, the new wine-first snack-forward project from the Claud and Penny team, operators who reliably set the tone for what the city pays attention to.
If the last era was wine bars acting like restaurants, the next one looks like a return to wine bars as wine bars.
Londonization of the New York Food Scene
The next wave of imports in New York is already looking distinctly British with the highly anticipated arrival of star-studded London icons, Ambassadors Clubhouse, Dishoom, and Straker’s. And it feels like only the beginning, perhaps an early-sign that more London players may jump across the pond in 2026.
Tasting Menus With a Point of View
I think we’ll see shorter, clearer, and more narrative-driven tasting menus. Concepts like Kabawa point to a future where tasting menus feel intentional, not indulgent, and it feels like just the beginning. Kabawa feels like just the beginning…
The Ice Cream Renaissance
For years, Café Panna has been the city’s singular ice-cream reference point. With Morgenstern’s closing after its ten year footing and froyo re-entering the chat, the ice cream category feels wide open for disruption in 2026. Perhaps we will see chef-led gelato counters, soft-serve with ambition, and terroir-minded dairy programs?
The Return of Late-Night Dining
After years of early reservations and early closings, NYC feels primed for an after-midnight revival with kitchens that stay open with purpose, bars where the food is a co-star, and specific dishes and menus made for late-night dining.
Non-Alcoholic Nightlife
The sober-curious movement isn’t a phase anymore; it’s becoming infrastructure. This year saw the opening of Soft Bar, one of New York’s first fully non-alcoholic bars, and a sign of what’s ahead. Expect to see more concepts like this in 2025: bars and concepts thoughtfully designed for NA craft as cocktails.
Weirder Nostalgia
Nostalgia took a sharper edge this year with hot pockets and everything bagel caesar salad croutons. Expect next year’s nostalgia to lean weirder: deviled eggs, baked potatoes, garlic bread, shrimp cocktail, familiar staples reconsidered with new technique, new texture, new attitude.
NYC’s Sourdough Bagel Era
New York’s sourdough bagel scene begins and ends with Apollo Bagel’s fairly one-dimensional concept, but the lines prove there’s room for more. The appetite is there, but the scene and curation have not yet found their footing. LA figured this out years ago with spots like Courage, Layla, Jyan Isaac, and newcomer Mustard’s Bagels who have built their followings on chef-driven combinations and produce-forward topping like: peak-season tomatoes, herbs, and greens used with intention. It’s a level of creativity that New York hasn’t tapped into yet.
A richer, more imaginative sourdough bagel era feels overdue. And if no one claims it soon, I may have to capitalize on it in 2026.
What are your 2026 dining predictions? Did I miss anything??
Re: NA nightlife, there’s a new bar in Clinton Hill that offers every one of their drinks as with or sans booze! Golden Ratio
I hope your ice cream prediction is accurate! Personally, I love the truly good Taco shops we saw come to Manhattan in 2025 (Santo Taco, Taco 1986 come to mind) & I wouldn’t be mad about more in 2026