The Good Taste Industrial Complex

Maybe it’s the dark, moody lighting, the Japanese glassware, the brushed steel cutlery that seems plucked from an antique shop in France (David Mellor’s Odeon comes up a lot), and the perfectly-curated soundtracks, but “good taste” seems to be ubiquitous in New York City’s more popular restaurants as of late. All of these elements hum along silently as background actors to the starring role that is the “cool” restaurant.

You can't manufacture good taste—it’s hard enough to define—and you certainly can't chase it without watching it slip through your fingers. But at the moment, the most talked-about rooms in the city are treating it not as an afterthought but as primary material, deployed as deliberately as the menu itself, and a handful of names keep surfacing as having outsized influence.