“Once 2010s minimalism is gone, what’s the next main aesthetic?” This question was asked in a Reddit thread a year ago, and lately, its application to the world of restaurant decor has been growing in my mind.
Until very recently, the visual shorthand for a Very Cool Place to eat was easy to spot: a pastel color palette — heavy on the pale millennial pink, of course — with minimalist, Nordic midcentury modern furniture; Jean Cocteau-esque line art; ceramics in an array of dusty shades; and a sense that interiors were graphic-designed rather than lived in, inoffensively photogenic and social-media-ready. Call it the Wayfair-ification of design interiors. When they weren’t pink, walls were off-white and unembellished; everything was smooth and beige. There was the Butcher’s Daughter, which opened its first NYC location in 2012, as well as Dimes, Sqirl, and over time, many, many locations of Sweetgreen. We may have reached peak millennial aesthetic with Carthage Must Be Destroyed, the Bushwick brunch spot that opened in 2016 with a fleet of pale pink dishware (it shuttered in 2023) and the pink-on-pink dining room at London’s Sketch, which felt designed specifically for optimal Instagrammage.
But at some point, we reached oversaturation. Instead of fresh, the decor style started feeling copy-paste. Hell, even Sketch is no longer pink. Lately, some of the most coveted reservations are for new restaurants whose decor leans away from the monstera-plant-millennial-minimalism of yore for a more robust, tchotchke-heavy eclecticism — an ambiance that hearkens back to a time of worn wood booths, Kit-Cat Klocks, and the glow of an overhead Tiffany-style lamp on your beef dip, in lieu of dining in what has started to feel like sterile, prefab designs with oatmeal-colored walls.
Why? Chalk it down to the great vibe shift.
As Allison P. Davis wrote for the Cut in her 2022 article “A Vibe Shift Is Coming,” the aesthetics of a post-2020, post-Tr*mp, post-lockdown world already felt different from the slick-bunned, girl boss millennialism that had reigned for over a decade. The cafe space at the Wing, frequented by Alison Roman in 2017, now sat empty. Suddenly, everything felt, well, not fractured — as we slide out of a recognizable trajectory, our surroundings become more curious, more kaleidoscopic. As trend forecaster Sean Monahan explains in the piece, “Everyone [came] out of [COVID] hibernation being like, What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing?.” Restaurant decor, like fashion and entertainment, is also changing courses. We were once soothed by beige walls, figurative line art, and table succulents, but now, a deeper nostalgia is coming to the surface: one for folksy, worn-in spaces.
To understand what this means for the current state of restaurant decor, one need only observe the dining rooms of some of the buzziest recent openings. Consider the Feathers Tavern, the newest darling of the Hudson Valley which “offers a menu rooted in early American and traditional country cookery” with heaping spoonfuls of storybook, Tasha Tudor ambiance; or Los Angeles speakeasy Kissa Corazón, with its mismatched table lamps, overstuffed brown leather chairs, and grandfather clock.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Ophelia’s Pizza Bar, which opened in 2023, is practically wallpapered with tchotchkes and framed pictures; April Bloomfield (of Spotted Pig and Breslin fame) just opened a bar called the Victorian in Austin, Texas, with paisley fabric chairs and antique chests; while in Portland, Maine, recently opened Luncheonette delivers cheery strokes of Kelly green paint, vintage-looking honeycomb floor tiles, and the sensation that, at any moment, a Madame Alexander doll will be plating your celery root remoulade.
But my personal favorite newcomer that embodies the shift toward the nostalgic tavern aesthetic is Pitt’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Behold its straws, contained in the neck of this ceramic cow; feast your eyes on its carrot-print wallpaper. Black-and-white check print parades across its windows like ants on a summer picnic blanket, or the frame of your mother’s Mary Engelbreit needlepoint. It looks the way a Mary Oliver poem feels: warm, accumulated over time, and often graced with geese.
I asked Evan Collins, architectural designer and co-founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, why he thinks this nostalgic tavern aesthetic is so popular right now. “In [politically turbulent] times like these, [there’s a] shift back into escapism and retro-revival,” he says, “There’s an intense desire to inject some whimsy, quirkiness, and retro-influenced kitsch into design after a decade of [what feels like a] very tasteful, inoffensive, though suffocatingly homogenous zeitgeist.” Present in this revived visual identity, he points out, is a bygone version of Americana that was friendlier, more unified, and less trend-centered, now resuscitated to flood your millennial senses with visuals that feel like a facsimile memory from your own childhood home or comfort restaurant.
According to Pitt’s interior designer Sydney Moss, this nostalgic bent was intentional. As she tells me, “When people go out to eat, they are investing their time into an experience. Finding quirky objects and colorful wallpaper was the natural path forward in turning Pitt’s into a place people would remember.” She adds, “I have a lot to say on the subject of the move away from blob minimalism, a lot of which [has] to do with fast paced trends and AI slop leading us into a monoculture devoid of individual aesthetics.”
Alienated by the “suffocatingly homogenous” white-walls era, the people cry for a more personal perspective. As Rafael Tonon reported for Eater in 2022, even the menu equivalent of millennial minimalism, itself heavily influenced by Nordic minimalism, has also been in decline, with a shift away from single-word dishes and back to “full descriptors, with long, double-barreled lists of details about provenance, sauces, cooking methods, and sides.”
But like the killer(s) in the Scream franchise, this doesn’t mean millennial minimalism will simply relent, since it’s become a common-denominator aesthetic that’s low-risk. (One recent example: Little Ruby’s new Williamsburg location, where pastel millennial blob art abounds.)
You can’t go home again. But you can dress your restaurant in a convincingly eclectic array of thrift-store gems, and for now, that’s close enough.
