Times change, and with them, so do our preferences. We no longer crave the abstruse concepts or unique chips that restaurants shine on. We don’t want to be rushed or pointed to the quality of the food through prices. All our soul craves is to break bread at a table with close friends, nothing else. At the end of a hard week, all we want is to be transported in time and space. It could also use a bottle of wine, of course, but definitely nothing else. So let’s raise our glasses to the rebirth of real restaurants.
Let’s think of restaurants that immediately become familiar after the first visit. The same ones where you meet your friends, sit down at the table, order food and for a couple of short hours you feel much happier than before. These restaurants make you want to come back for more pasta with a generous helping of cheese and pepper.
Here are the best places in the U.S. where you can feel your stomach’s utter and never-ending happiness.
1. Felix Trattoria
Venice, CA.
Felix Trattoria envelops you in a dome of pleasure and serenity from the very first moments you’re there, with little sips of white negroni, and still hot – in the sense that it’s just out of the oven – a slice of white bread that burns your fingers and gullet with a pleasant tingle. You gaze with amusement at the big, bearded chef, who, like a Greek Minotaur behind the glass maze of a restaurant kitchen, is enthusiastically kneading and stretching the strands of pasta. And when that perfectly tender, stretchy, juicy spaghetti reaches your taste buds, you begin to truly believe that it was a mistake to ever use your mouth as an organ of verbal speech when it could be relentlessly stuffed with food from Felix Trattoria. This restaurant deserved the top spot on the list because it is the golden mean between traditional and innovative, cozy and exciting. And when you’re lucky enough to knock out a table at Felix Trattoria, you won’t have a second of doubt that an evening spent at this restaurant will make you the happiest person on the planet.
2. The Grill & the Pool
New York.
At some point, you stop expecting much from the big restaurant chains. It starts to feel like they’re doing all their projects in a pattern. That’s about the kind of expectation everyone had for a new project by Major Food Group, owned by well-known chefs Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone and entrepreneur Jeff Zalaznik. With an easy pitch from the landlord of Seagram Building, located in the heart of New York City, they opened a restaurant in a place that could easily be considered a city landmark. The landmark location used to be the Four Seasons Hotel, and Major Food Group has revived the hotel’s style of elegance and cultural chic. It’s also impressive that they were able to do this simultaneously with two separate restaurants: the design of the Grill in their arrangement speaks to the continuity of luxury-the signature vichyssoise soup sprinkled with tiny pearls of black caviar; the Pool, on the other hand, is a temple to the abundance of the sea-the raw and cooked fish dishes served with an oxymoron in our culture of rich simplicity. Both remind us what it means to truly go out. To get dressed up and forget for a couple of hours that the world around you is falling apart.
3. JuneBaby
Seattle.
We appreciate that good restaurants promote total relaxation and denial of any problems. So the appearance of Eduardo Jordan’s restaurant, whose official website proudly displays a history of dishes like burgha, kalalu, ugali and succotash, may seem odd, since it does take concentration to learn all that information. But don’t worry ahead of time; no one will test your knowledge later. In fact, Jordan doesn’t want to bring any extra stress to anyone; he merely hopes to introduce the U.S. public to the food of his ancestors, which has been reverently passed down from generation to generation by his African diaspora. His dishes tell the story of his life, but they also touch the lives of millions like him. Our advice to you, order everything from the intriguingly extravagant menu, which includes items such as pork ears with peppered cheese, oxtails and hummingbird cake, then take a stroll through the night city rethinking and digesting.
4 Coquine
Portland, Oregon.
There are restaurants whose design and overall feel just screams in your head. And there are those that quietly whisper. At Coquine Restaurant, I spent an evening that was a model of quiet, muted conversation between the closest of us. I sat on the summer terrace of the restaurant with a few old friends, and it was as if we were enveloped in a vacuum of silence and stillness, without the usual noise of cars, people and the city. And while the night, with shades of light dozing, slowly enveloped us, chef Kathy Millard, who has taken a young fighter’s course at such places as Maison Troisgos in France and Coi in San Francisco, created simple poems of greens, beans and calamari. And if the moment a plate of crispy-roasted chicken meat was placed on our table, everyone sitting there went numb for a moment, it was only because we had no words to describe our awe at this perfect dish.
5. Roister
Chicago
The variety of choices and simple-minded enthusiasm inherent in Roister creates the false impression that this is a stereotypical Southern restaurant. The blazing fire in the fireplace echoes the New Pyromania influence (a restaurant design trend that explains the stacks of firewood and light, rustic ambiance in almost every new restaurant), but chef Andrew Brochu’s very presence makes Roister too complex and multifaceted to be shoved under a single theme. The titan of the Aliena restaurant business, led by kitchen geniuses like Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas, would hire no one less worthy than Broschou. For this restaurant, he created a unique menu, which was later matched by the establishment’s interior, and now, upon entering Roister, you can spot touches of Chinese and Japanese influences, and the chefs can surprise you with Sichuan dumplings with shrimp and oatmeal, all in the name of playful radicalism.
