There’s a term I’ve been hearing tossed around a lot recently: “middle-aged” restaurants. It came up during a panel of critics at the recent Chef Assembly conference in Philadelphia, after someone asked about food media’s reliance on “best new” lists. Shortly after, it was the topic of a newsletter by Taste editor Matt Rodbard (“Why Middle-Aged Restaurants Matter the Most”), who attributed the term to Grub Street critic Matthew Schneier, with whom he’d just done a podcast interview discussing the topic. The same day, writer (and Eater NY contributor) Andrea Strong launched a column in her newsletter called “Don’t Forget,” which she described as an attempt to “shine a light on more middle-aged restaurants.” And hey, three’s a trend.
A “middle-aged” restaurant is a few years into its tenure. It’s not the newcomer with long lines and new-kid jitters that’s nevertheless poised to end up on a list of rising hot spots. Nor is it the well-known stalwart: the decades-old place without which you can’t fully understand a city’s dining scene. It’s the restaurant that’s proven itself; a place people like enough for it to have stuck around for at least three to five years, where — instead of early-day missteps — there’s a settled-in ease to the service and a time-tested confidence to the food. In this way, a restaurant ages much like a person: Your 20s are the time for shaky decision-making, crises of self, and unearned bravado; it’s in your 30s and onward that you’ve learned from your past, understand what you really want, and actually know what the hell you’re talking about.
Middle-aged restaurants are ones that “get better and better, sometimes after the klieg light of early attention has moved along,” Schneier said. To put it another way: In 2022, my former colleague Luke Fortney proclaimed that the best restaurants at the time were really restaurants that had opened in 2016. I remember when it was impossible to get a table at Bonnie’s, Calvin Eng’s Cantonese American restaurant in Brooklyn. Now it’s five years old, less buzzy but more worked into the neighborhood — solidly middle-aged.
Anyone who dines out frequently knows that this really is the sweet spot for a restaurant, but ironically, it’s also the opposite of where the public discourse around restaurants tends to focus. “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,” Rodbard wrote. When another burst of hot new restaurants opens — in a place like New York City, that happens quickly — these briefly buzzed-about restaurants then get shafted into a weird position: “too old to be news, too young to be history,” as Rodbard put it. In Eater terms: If the options are Heatmap and Eater 38, the middle-aged restaurant has historically had a less-obvious place to get the spotlight, despite probably growing more interesting over time.
As someone who scouts for Eater’s Best New Restaurants list each year, I often lament the job-required recency bias in my own dining. I can only go out so often and thus, I’ve historically had to direct my dining in a way that I don’t think necessarily reflects how restaurants go on to improve or grow to become essential in their neighborhoods. Sometimes, I think restaurants get better precisely because that “klieg light of early attention” has moved on, allowing them to find themselves in the safety of shadows. But the result is that, sometimes, we don’t get to see that. Sometimes, as much as I love a restaurant even in its early days, I never make it back in, and then that haunts me when, say, the restaurant closes.
The name of Strong’s column, “Don’t Forget,” gets at why this feels so pertinent right now: We all move on too fast, and we’re now seeing the consequences of that, with restaurants glowing bright, but burning out quickly. The pace of modern media has made everything a microtrend, with the window of attention shrinking smaller and smaller each day, and restaurants have gotten eaten up in that algorithmic churn. Hype culture relies on always having some shiny new object to herald, and everyone’s increasingly weary of hype now. We’re all rightfully over being shouted at about the “next best thing.” Some diners, at least, seem to be tired of this disloyal approach, hence the growing desire to return to the good old days of being a “regular.”
I think the extreme focus on newness made sense when there were fewer platforms for sharing information about restaurants and fewer people weighing in on what had just opened. But when everyone with a phone wants to tell you about [TikTok voice] “the best restaurant in New York City right now,” the places that truly stand out are the ones that rely on more than trendiness. Hype is manufactured, and I think we’re all starting to see through the illusion that novelty and the exclusivity conferred by the hard-to-get reservation do not, in fact, make the food better. That charming new-ish restaurant deserves a chance to make it to middle age: It’s rare that anyone is at their best in their youth, after all.
The launch of this newsletter, as well as Eater’s dining reports, have given me more space to praise and vouch for these so-called middle-aged restaurants. Want to know more of my favorites? I made a list of them on the Eater app.
