Your Neighborhood Restaurant’s Day Job

The first all-day cafe that I really remember taking hold in Manhattan was Nick Morgenstern’s El Rey, which opened in 2013 (I still think about its sweet potato loaves). By 2018, the year it closed, the New Yorker proclaimed that all-day cafes fed “the needs of the gig economy,” pointing to spots like De Maria, Westbourne, and Atla—none still around—but representative of a certain easygoing cafe open into night that attracted the kind of creative freelancer you see and wonder what do they even do for work? All-day cafes are a dime a dozen now, but it was novel for New York at the time. They’ve become all the more relevant in the remote-work era.

I recently heard my colleague, Annie Armstrong, use the phrase “splitscreening,” which takes the concept one step further. By her definition, it’s when a dinner-only restaurant brings on a separate cafe operator to use the space during the day. At Margot in Fort Greene, for instance, Winner has run a daytime bakery. Or, as Curbed reported, the downtown bar, Francis Kite Club, operates as an office for a magazine, Lux, during the week. More than a pop-up, it’s an ongoing partnership with benefits for both parties.