This New Restaurant Trend in the U.S. Makes Dining Out Feel Like a Dinner Party

I might as well have been at a friend’s place. Seated at a slatted wooden table surrounded by cookbook-lined shelves, comfy seating, and cheeky art (is that…framed underwear?), I almost forgot that I was actually paying to dine in a former beauty-supply warehouse in Atlanta. Chef and ceramist Zach Meloy hosts his weekly supper club, Dirt Church, for a select bunch — never more than 16 people.

The evening I attended, husband in tow, there were four other couples at the table. As at any dinner party where you might not know everyone, we made polite small talk at first, smiling over the crisp-tender split-pea-falafel canapés. By the end of the evening, however, we were all laughing like old friends.

That’s by design: Meloy launched Dirt Church in 2023 out of a desire to break away from the traditional turnover-driven model of hospitality. “For me, the true goal is to get people to just sit down and be with other people,” he explains.

It’s a concept that’s taking off across the country, as small-scale restaurants — many with 20 or fewer seats — put as much emphasis on the communal energy as on the food. 

In Cashiers, North Carolina, chef Scott Alderson opened Native Prime Provisions in a shopping center, right between a carpet-cleaning company and a hair salon. After 25 years as a private chef and restaurant consultant, he and his wife, Tania Duncombe, returned to this mountain resort town, where he cooked early in his career. Alderson didn’t want the stress of a full-service restaurant — but he did want to cook for guests.

So, he set up an eight-person counter within his seafood market-slash-butcher shop, and now serves lunch five days a week. The ever-changing menu might include nigiri of ahi from Honolulu or pork-belly sliders made with meat from Snake River Farms in Idaho. Dishes are presented on handmade pottery; jazz tunes set a mellow ambience.

“There’s no stainless steel in this place,” Alderson says, admiringly. “This is like my living room.”

Also residential in feel is One White Street, in New York City, which is set in a TriBeCa town house that once belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (The couple never actually lived there, but they did use it to declare, in 1973, the formation of the “country” of Nutopia.) The three-story space accommodates 18 or fewer on each floor, with a talk-to-your-neighbors vibe, chef Austin Johnson says. “The music’s loud, it’s fun, and it’s not pretentious,” he explains. The seasonally driven à la carte and tasting menus highlight produce from Johnson’s Hudson Valley farm, Rigor Hill. Dishes might include seared scallops with spring greens and hakurei turnips or Long Island fluke crudo with snow peas and carrots.

Portland’s L’Orange is a wine-forward restaurant that seats 28, split across three distinct rooms, an arrangement that helps amp up the coziness of each. “It basically feels like you’re entering somebody’s home,” says chef Joel Stocks, whose cooking leans Mediterranean, with dishes like cold-smoked sturgeon, sunchokes, and white beans dressed with lovage butter. “We kind of lean in to that house-party vibe. It’s just that the food and wine might be fancier than what you’d be doing at your own place.”

Up the coast in Seattle, chef Evan Leichtling and partner Meghna Prakash opened their 12-seat restaurant Off Alley in, well, an alley. The venue, which is just over six feet wide, puts a focus on natural wines and whole-animal cooking — and it gets rowdy, with servers shouting out orders, punk rock pumping over the speakers, and guests sitting on barstools against the wall.

The vibe is admittedly “rock and roll,” Prakash says. “But that allows us to actually create a closer connection with the guests. I don’t know if that would be possible in a much bigger setting.”

A version of this story first appeared in the September 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Small Bites.”