When Chateau Royale opened in New York City last year, it embodied the city’s rising “swankstaurant” moment, in which the saturation of the steakhouse gave rise to “a new age of gloss,” per Grub Street’s Matthew Schneier. At Chateau Royale, a single-bite
beggar’s purse of caviar and crème fraîche went for $39. A $72 lobster thermidor and $90 Dover sole anchored the entrees. The $24 martinis were made tableside on a trolley. At its opening, co-owner Cody Pruitt described the restaurant as “familiarity, just with a little bit more of a tuxedo on it.”
That restaurant is no longer, though, replaced in August by Floradora, a drastically different concept from the same ownership. This reincarnation is more like jeans-and-a-T-shirt familiar: mozzarella sticks, $17; pull-apart garlic bread, $7; vodka sauce pasta, $25. Here, the steak frites au poivre run $49, significantly less than Chateau’s $69 rendition. At Floradora, it uses bavette as opposed to the latter’s filet mignon, but the argument is that filet is for an occasion, and Floradora is meant to be not just for any night, but many nights. It’s “everyday luxury,” Pruitt says, which, to him, is about “generosity, ease, and feeling welcome.” There are still tableside martinis — the custom cart was an investment, after all — but the prices have dropped, since each table’s server now pours the martini, as opposed to an attendant who manned only the cart.
Over the past few months, Pruitt and his business partner Jacob Cohen have done two shake-ups like this, in an almost too-on-the-nose manifestation of the current economic climate. In June, they replaced their French bistro Libertine, where duck for two clocked in at $72 in 2023, with Capitaine, where — excluding the caviar and seafood towers — the highest-priced item on the menu is the $52 steak frites. Most dishes are under $30, with more snacks on the menu to allow diners lower-key ways of stopping in — there are only so many special occasion spots a city can sustain.
“At a certain point, the world around both [restaurants] began to change,” Pruitt says. “We were increasingly conscious of what a restaurant costs people and how often they could use it.” There is a difference, he notes, between a restaurant that belongs to a neighborhood and one that merely takes up space in it.
The accepted logic across these years of rampant inflation has been, however bleak, that once prices hit a certain point, they won’t go back down again. Receipts from 2021 inspire shock at how much further money went just a few years ago. A $30 burger at a nice restaurant has gone from spectacle to surprisingly common. The $20 cocktail paved the way for the $24 one, and given this escape velocity, the $30+ drinks now on menus were simply inevitable. Every month brings some new absurdity — $60 bread, $40 half-chickens — that makes people wonder: Who is even buying this? Prices can only go so high before diners start to drop out of the whole endeavor, and restaurants, however counterintuitively, begin to price themselves out of existence.
For the owners of some high-end restaurants, the current economic landscape has led to an existential pondering. Does everyone really want near-$100 shareable mains, especially on the average weeknight? What’s the point of the luxurious, glitzy restaurant to which many diners might go only once or twice?
In a reassessment similar to Pruitt and Cohen’s, some operators across the country have been taking the same action: flipping their higher-end restaurants to more affordable models that they hope will be more sustainable — that’s both for diners and for themselves. If the steakhouses and swankstaurants of 2025 represented, at best, a display of status aspirations (and, at worst, the growing economic stratification of American society), the flipped restaurants of 2026 represent a necessary reckoning with reality, in which our collective foundations feel more unstable than ever.
Some high-end restaurants in Los Angeles — where even bars are now lowering prices — have come to the same conclusion. When Anthony Wang’s Firstborn and Mei Lin’s 88 Club opened in short succession in the spring of 2025, the two restaurants represented an exciting moment for upscale and innovative diasporic Chinese food in the city. At Firstborn, Wang took cues from twice-cooked pork with a barbecued cabbage that took two days to make, slow-roasting cabbage until its leaves turned tender, then pressing them terrine-like with confit leeks and serving it in broiled slices with a sauce of burnt alliums and black vinegar. It went for $22. At 88 Club, Lin served a fancy shrimp toast, sliced into three teatime-esque pieces, dolloped with hot mustard on one side and sweet-and-sour sauce on the other. Its going rate: $38.
At the time of 88 Club’s opening, Lin cited some concern about the viability of a high-end restaurant amid the economic climate. The combination of wildfires, immigration raids, and the writers strike (and its ripple effects across the entertainment industry) in recent years have pummeled the city’s restaurant industry, leading to constant, heartbreaking closures. Perhaps for this reason, the two restaurants remain oddly synchronized: This year, both flipped into pointedly more accessible formats.
In February, Firstborn announced that it would be scrapping its a la carte menu in favor of a four-course prix fixe, priced at $68 per person. In the original model, check averages were dwindling and becoming unpredictable. While the previous menu of shareable dishes sometimes left diners unsure of how to structure a meal, the restaurant’s current goal is to “get a full meal in front of you and just tell you what it costs,” says Wang. Given that the $100-ish tasting menu is now considered a deal in many cities, $68 per person felt like a “manageable” number that communicated that “this is a value-driven restaurant,” Wang says.
Operationally, there have been some benefits to the flip at Firstborn. With just three options available for each course, the restaurant can put more unconventional products such as sweetbreads or lamb neck on the menu with some certainty that they’ll sell. (The restaurant’s popular fried chicken and mapo tofu with sweetbreads remain available as supplements.) In the kitchen, prep can be more focused since cooks are doing fewer things, though more of each. Turn times have also become more predictable.
88 Club has seen slightly more upheaval. In April, Lin stepped away from the restaurant, leaving it to former business partner Francis Miranda. Last month, Miranda flipped the concept into Tiger Tiger, where under the direction of chef Michael Chih, $36 black pepper filet mignon and $30 char siu take the place of $125 black pepper strip steak featuring Westholme wagyu and $88 char siu using Ibérico pork.
With its small menu and its no-substitutions approach, 88 Club was “honestly just way too expensive,” Miranda says. The check average for two people without alcohol was $250 on the low end; add drinks, and it was closer to $400. “It really became a place where you would come to say you’ve come once, and then you wouldn’t come again,” Miranda says. At Tiger Tiger, the goal is for the check average to be in the range of $60 to $80 per person. Right now, diners care less about buzzwords signifying high-end ingredients and more about whether the portion sizes will allow for leftovers. 88 Club’s approach was “chef-driven,” Miranda says. “Now, it’s really guest-driven.”
If Tail Up Goat, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Washington, D.C., had continued as it was, “we would have limped to the end of our lease,” says Jill Tyler, who opened it in 2016 with her husband, chef Jon Sybert. That’s not to say that the restaurant — which alternated its format between a la carte and tasting menu, the latter priced at $135 per person by the end — didn’t have its wins. 2019 and the start of 2020 were its busiest years ever. But after the pandemic, “the pieces never fit back together,” Tyler says. By the time Tail Up Goat closed in late 2025, they’d “essentially been running a nonprofit for five years.” While cutting benefits might have made the restaurant profitable, that wasn’t the business Tyler and Sybert wanted to run.
At the suggestion of Arjav Ezekiel, who runs Birdie’s in Austin, Texas, the couple considered a different model: counter service. Tyler was initially skeptical of the concept, having only seen it employed in D.C. at restaurants much more casual than the one she wanted to run, but the math made sense. The couple flipped the space into Rye Bunny, which opened in April. It offers dishes as thoughtful as at Tail Up Goat — ricotta cavatelli with grilled cabbage and smoked onion cream; arctic char a la plancha paired with mustard beurre blanc — but in a different format. Without table service, Tyler and Sybert have cut their staffing needs by 22 percent and their labor costs by 30 percent, while still providing the benefits they found essential, such as healthcare and a week of PTO for all full-timers. Over half the workers previously worked at Tail Up Goat.
The price of the food at Rye Bunny might still run counter to some diners’ expectations. Pasta is $28 and large proteins hover between $30 and $50, though Tyler’s goal is for all of its pricing to come with an “impressive” amount of food. “[We want people to think], Wow, that felt like a value,” she says. Unlike the structure of Tail Up Goat, the looser Rye Bunny, which doesn’t take reservations, gives diners more control over how much they might spend. “By no means are we an inexpensive night out,” Tyler says. “But we’re trying to responsibly occupy the middle [of the dining spectrum].”
While the challenges of running a restaurant remain, some of the pressure has eased over Rye Bunny’s short time in business. They’re making their loan payments without worries about what payroll looks like in six weeks. “I can’t imagine having done anything else now that we’re in it,” Tyler says. Towards the end of Tail Up Goat, even staying in restaurants felt tenuous. Right now, Tyler says, the main feeling is fun: “It’s been freeing to totally reset.” To her, Sybert’s cooking feels imbued with new energy; Rye Bunny’s format allows him to still put dishes he’s excited about on the menu on a whim, like a beef rib special of which only six might be available in a given night.
That freedom of approach is not necessarily a universal feeling. For 88 Club, the trade-off of the flip into Tiger Tiger has been, most notably, a loss of ambition. The menu is made up of familiar favorites available at most Chinese restaurants: chow mein, dan dan noodles, salt and pepper shrimp; their execution isn’t intended to push the envelope. It’s comfort, and comfort food is common. “To me, that is the formula for what actually survives these crazy times that we’re in,” Miranda says. He’s seen many peers close, either unwilling to change their highbrow concepts or unable to modify their pricing by virtue of their expensive buildouts.
Dialing back ambition can have some silver linings. Lowering expectations via dishes that sound run-of-the-mill creates the opportunity for chefs to over-deliver in their execution. And when the dishes on a menu seem affordable and not immediately like the restaurant is trying to take diners for a ride, diners might be inclined to order an extra dish they might not have tried otherwise, or to get a glass of wine when they might have previously written drinks off as a needless expense. A sense of generosity on the restaurant’s end can beget a similar generosity from guests. Now, value feels like the utmost form of hospitality.
With a somewhat wistful nature, Miranda mentions Nightshade, the creative and universally beloved restaurant that he and Mei Lin opened in 2018. It became a pandemic casualty, its premature closure prompting people who’d dined there to still speak with reverence of its mapo tofu lasagna, tom yum bloomin’ onion, and playful cocktails. “We’re living in different culinary times and different political times,” Miranda says. Running a restaurant, especially at this moment, requires shaking off some sentimentality in favor of clear-eyed practicality. “Right now, it’s not a matter of any feelings,” he says. “It’s adapt or you will close.”
