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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NEW YORK CITY’S NEW GILDED AGE  
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Linette Lopez
April 4, 2024
Business Insider
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_ Beneath the city's victory over the pandemic and dining's glorious
return is great divide between the haves and the have-nots. This new
economy reveals the dramatic difference between those who can handle
an inflationary shock and those who cannot. _

New York City dining has embraced a new Gilded Age with luxurious,
maximalist restaurants with decadent ingredients as international as
the city. , Carl Godfrey for BI

 

The bars and restaurants that put the glint on New York City never
stopped partying.

While the rest of the country — businesses, investors
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regular people — misspent 2023 in a state of anxiety, waiting for a
recession
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never came, the bastions of New York City's dining elite came out of
the pandemic louder, prouder, and more extravagant than ever.

Here, it's ancient Rome. And if New York City has a legalized form of
popular bloodsport, it's the restaurant business.

To dine at the most sought-after restaurants is an exercise in
one's capacity to tolerate rejection
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In old New York, money and cache
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the currencies that could, eventually, find you a seat wherever you
wanted. But the internet and reservation apps like Resy
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removed person-to-person contact in these bookings and turned scoring
a coveted table into the shortest video game ever played
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Status still talks, but tech nerds who've programmed bots to crawl for
reservations have added a disconcerting new layer. Recently, I met a
man who has a constant crawl for a five-person table at a chic new
restaurant. He was very proud of himself for this. I was not.

The surge of demand doesn't mean everything has been easy. Food prices
have risen steadily, the hot job market has made workers hard to find
and keep, and, of course, there's the inexorable rise of New York City
rents. Yet new restaurants have kept coming. And not just any
restaurants — luxurious, maximalist restaurants with ingredients as
international as the city itself.

The new wave of eateries is also a stark contrast to the previous era
of NYC dining. After the financial crisis, the city put on a black
turtleneck à la Steve Jobs and presented everything with clean lines
and prized understatement. Now it's returned to something that looks
more like the Gilded Age
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a maximalist mob-wife aesthetic that orders "more with a side of much
more." The city's bars have gone rococo as well. Is there a greater
vote of confidence in New York's economic recovery than opening a tiki
bar that feels like a dive, hangs florals like a wedding at the Grand
Prospect Hall
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and asks people to pay $25 for a cocktail called "Tarman"?

Beneath the city's shimmering victory over the pandemic and dining's
glorious return as Gotham's favorite pastime, there's still a great
divide between the haves and the have-nots
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As the pandemic emergency abated, our weird new economy revealed the
dramatic difference between Americans who feel they can handle an
inflationary shock and those who cannot. So it makes sense that
Manhattan, where the income gap is greater than any other county in
the country, has been the vanguard of this American vibe revolution.
It is a granite island of hungry rich people
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for something to do — Wall Street bankers, tech executives,
generationally wealthy people, the famous and beautiful. In a country
roiled by recession worries, those at the top of New York City — for
better or worse — couldn't give a single gilded shit.

THE BIG APPLE BITES BACK

Opening a new business anywhere is an act of hope. Opening a
restaurant even more so. Opening a restaurant in New York City
requires the faith of a medieval saint. For an industry that already
existed on a knife's edge, the pandemic looked like it could be a
catastrophic blow
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Were it not for delivery apps, creative outdoor seating
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and many New Yorkers' stubborn resistance to learning to use their
apartment kitchens, we might have lost even more of our eateries than
we did. In this town, an unlisted, unmarked, hole-in-the-wall serving
top-flight Xinjiang noodles can be every bit a destination as Tavern
on the Green — and the food will probably be better. Even with this
chaos, New York is a city that embraces bizarre circumstances, and
when the pandemic took hold, that became its superpower.

"I think the city and New Yorkers are so different and so unfazed by
it. Remember when there were a million people eating outside?"
Jennifer Saesue, a Manhattan restaurateur, said.

Saesue opened her first restaurant, Fish Cheeks, in 2017, and before
long, it became a staple for the downtown set. During the pandemic,
Fish Cheeks survived as other restaurants did — ramping up takeout
and setting up outdoor seating. Saesue said that after a lull during
lockdowns, its revenue clicked back into the normal cycle of the
city's restaurant business: a slow start to the year, a busy spring, a
slower summer, and then full-on mania starting in the fall and through
the holiday season.

Since then, New Yorkers staved off recession fears by simply spending
like it would never come 
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especially on food, drinks, and entertainment. By the end of March
2023, nightlife spending reached 11% above pre-pandemic levels, a
report from Mastercard found. It's not hard to understand why. Few
people in the country lived as cramped an existence through the
pandemic as New Yorkers did. Once it was over, they bet everything on
the return of the institutions that form the backbone of the city's
culture. The rest of the country could keep their weak vibes. For New
York City, a brush with death called for a time of decadence.

"I feel like we are back to where we were pre-pandemic. Now more than
ever, people are spending, and even more so, restaurants are opening
back up," Saesue told me. "There are new, hot restaurants opening
every freaking week."

So that's what the city's doing now. Get into it. Clubsteraunts are
back, and Gen Z
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a generation that claims to dislike fun
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can be seen there in full force. The city's bistros have met this
enthusiasm
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upping their game. Chefs in New York have somehow yassified
hard-boiled eggs, and LCD Soundsystem's frontman James Murphy has a
restaurant that's selling them for $25. Naturally, those eggs have
caviar on them. There's caviar everywhere. At Coqodaq, a just-opened
Korean fried chicken restaurant that looks like a Las Vegas church,
you can order a perfectly crisped nugget with caviar on it. It will
cost you $28 and whatever it takes you to get through a meal while
watching packs of TikTok food influencers completely lose their minds.

As the kids might say, "Nature is healing." The city's affluent
consists of the same Wall Street workhorses, fashion and
public-relations power brokers, trust-fund babies (American and
foreign), chic people, quasi-creatives of advertising, total nerds of
tech, and straight-up, never-sleeping hustlers — but their tastes
have changed. Members-only social clubs
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restaurants abound. The new Aman New York has a private club
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a $200,000 initiation fee, and the boys who brought us Carbone have a
private restaurant called ZZ's with a $20,000 initiation fee and
$10,000 annual membership. There are the Casas — Cruz and Cipriani
(both private clubs, no relation) — and the old mainstay Soho House,
which has expanded to three locations in the city. Private clubs
delineating the space between the haves and the have-nots were a
feature of the first Gilded Age. Here we are again, except now the
most sought-after restaurants can function almost as exclusively as
clubs — know someone, wait for hours, game the digital-reservation
system, beg (maybe) — and then maybe you'll get a seat at a decent
time to eat, like 9:30 p.m. (if you're lucky) or 5:30 p.m. (if you've
given up on fun).

                                                                                                                                                                                           


Saesue opened her second concept, Bangkok Supper Club, in the West
Village in 2023. It was immediately met with critical acclaim
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the kind of success that makes getting a reservation an only-in-NYC
kind of status symbol.

"Looking from where I am," Saesue told me, "it doesn't seem like
people are thinking about the recession that much. I think they're
talking about it, but their behavior doesn't say that."

A city is lucky if it has two or three dining rooms ethereal enough to
transport you to a world in which everything you see or touch is
precious. In the past few years, New York has opened them at a steady
clip. Most recently, the famed chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened
Four Twenty-Five on Park Avenue, where it feels like you are dining on
a crystal cloud. It's a place to watch a very classic uptown New York
City crowd — an older set of ultraprofessionals, mom and dad on date
night, women who have enough money but too much self-awareness to be
on "Real Housewives," money managers drinking
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the gorgeous bar after a late night at the office (yes, they're going
to the office
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For these people, there must be elegance at all times.

Not all of NYC nightlife is focused on making things fancy; some of it
is just theatrical and fun. In the East Village, Paradise Lost
transports patrons to a tiki bar located on a choppy beach near the
capitol of Hell. It works because the drinks are a full-on show. The
Saturn, a vintage gin cocktail that won the 1967 IBA championship,
comes smoking with dry ice. And if you order the Lady of the Beasts,
you'll experience what the bar calls "fire and show." Bongo drums will
ring out through the bar, and your server will present the cocktail to
you in a dazzle of flames. The Lady is just one of a few cocktails on
the menu that come with all of that drama. If there is a hard landing
for the US economy, NYC will have to meet it with a bit of a hangover.
After what the city went through, it will have been worth it.

THE FULL VIBESPACE

A survey of New York City's most glimmering restaurants and
competitive cocktailers is, of course, an incomplete picture of how
the city is recovering. The pandemic was a violent lesson in how an
inflationary shock impacts the affluent much less than everyone else.
And that makes for complex vibes.

According to a report from TouchBistro, a company that provides
point-of-sales services to restaurants, NYC restaurant margins
averaged around 9.2% in 2023, down from 10.1% a year in 2022 and just
below the national average of 9.3%. Food operators said they spent 43%
more on food costs in 2023 than they did in 2022, the highest jump in
the country. And while employers in other parts of the economy 
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regaining the upper hand, staff turnover at NYC restaurants was around
31% in 2023. The national average turnover rate sat at 28%. Every
restaurant is facing these issues, but businesses' ability to deal
with increasing costs — while holding onto customers — varies
greatly. A December survey from the New York City Hospitality Alliance
found that while 37% of respondents felt positive about future
business revenue, 30% percent of respondents were feeling pessimistic
about the future, and another 20% felt uncertain.

"New York City's restaurants and bars are experiencing an uneven
pandemic recovery nearly four years after COVID-19 struck our city,"
Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality
Alliance, said. "While some have recovered, others still struggle."

The restaurant industry is a mirror of the city
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The haves are being delighted in new dining rooms and glittering new
high-rises
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The have-nots are experiencing
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trauma of a record number of evictions, especially in Brooklyn and The
Bronx, and the squeeze of record-high rents
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No one seems to have an answer for New York's housing crisis, where
rental vacancies dropped to 1.4% in 2023 — a healthy rate is
considered somewhere between 5% and 8%.

Nationwide, in the aggregate, restaurants are growing. Sales reached a
seasonally-adjusted rate of $95.01 billion in January, up 0.7% from
December and the 11th month of consecutive growth. But that doesn't
mean the mood is great: 97% of restaurant owners are worried about
higher food costs, according to a survey from the National Restaurant
Association, and 38% say they didn't make money last year. That's a
lot of have-nots. In a moment when food prices are volatile at best
and workers are hard to come by, most of the restaurant industry has
to make hard decisions. As Corey Mintz argued
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this very publication, we may hate what it takes to save restaurants
— more self-service, higher prices — but we may not have a choice.
I don't care how many times the Nasdaq punches new highs — this does
not make for good vibes.

The city's last Gilded Age was as much a time of growth and vitality
as it was a time of corruption and inequality.

Restaurants are pinched, in part, because their patrons are pinched
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too. Yes, the rest of the country is starting to see what New York
City has been seeing: The worst is over. The University of Michigan
Consumer Sentiment Index
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significant improvement over the past two months, and the outlook for
inflation continues to improve. This is fantastic news for the
country, but as analysts at UBS pointed out in a recent note to
clients, just because we're not feeling bad doesn't mean we
necessarily feel good.

"These are encouraging developments and sentiment should continue to
improve as disinflation progresses, the Fed cuts rates and real
incomes keep rising," the UBS analysts wrote. "In short, the
vibecession for the public at large may be over, but the vibespansion
has a long way to go."

Inflation hurts everyone, but it is catastrophic for people who are
just getting by — or just starting to save a little bit. In an
extremely cringeworthy interview, WK Kellogg CEO Gary Pilnick
seemed excited
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he said his company's cereal-for-dinner messaging was "landing really
well."

"Cereal for dinner is something that is probably more on trend now,
and we would expect to continue as that consumer is under pressure,"
he said. Since 1978, CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460%, thanks mostly to
stock-based compensation. When prices go up dramatically, those who
can afford it may see it and know it, but they don't feel it. Those
who can't, apparently, make Gary Pilnick's day.

If a pandemic can't defeat New York City, a little inflation certainly
isn't going to do it. What it will do, though, is reveal the
structural weaknesses in our society. The city's last Gilded Age was
as much a time of growth and vitality as it was a time of corruption
and inequality. It was a warning for this town and the whole country.
Watching post-pandemic inflation at work is a warning, too. It showed
what it looks like when this American economy experiences a short,
sharp shock. And what that looks like is the affluent in New York City
eating caviar, and poorer Americans eating cereal.

_Linette Lopez_
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correspondent at Business Insider._

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