At first, clients didn’t know what to anticipate at Potential New Boyfriend in Asheville, North Carolina. In the course of the day, the house glows with a riot of pop artwork and daylight shining on a mishmash of couches and midcentury chairs. Visits kick off with amuse-bouches, but the wine checklist, plotted on a New York magazine-style matrix of flavors, skews informal. The meals menu, dreamed up by proprietor Disco and chef Dana Amromin, largely consists of desserts, like earthy tahini cheesecake or masala chai ice cream sundaes, however the bar solely serves clients a minimum of 21 years outdated. At night time, visitor DJs spin a wide range of tunes by high-end audio system; folks typically method the sales space considering they should order on the counter.
“Visitors don’t essentially know what to anticipate, which has its execs and cons,” Disco says. “We get to wow them.” Prospects aren’t the one ones who’ve struggled to parse Potential New Boyfriend. “Establishments don’t actually know what to do with us and how you can categorize us, whether or not it’s the liquor authority in North Carolina or insurance coverage corporations. That has been tough,” he provides.
After working a small ice cream startup at a farmer’s market, Disco determined he didn’t wish to open a scoop store. As a substitute, he threw collectively all of the issues he did need — frozen desserts, an off-the-cuff wine bar, small plates, a dwelling room-like house he may hand around in for hours — into one place. “I wished to piece collectively the very best of all worlds,” he says. “The expertise I wish to provide is as if clients got here to a pal’s front room for a cocktail party.”
Over the past 12 months, locals have discovered to benefit from the untraditional setup. As one of many first new companies to open after Hurricane Helene tore by Asheville in September, 2024, Potential New Boyfriend rapidly cemented itself as a staple of the group.
This type of multidimensional venue isn’t something new. All-day cafes and gastropubs have blurred the strains between restaurant, bar, and cafe for years. However in 2025, 5 years after the COVID pandemic destabilized the restaurant business, not-quite-restaurants are in all places — they usually’re actually good, turning out meals that rivals the very best sit-down eating places in contexts that shock and, sure, wow diners.
For months, the Eater workforce has crisscrossed the nation to compile our 2025 Finest New Eating places checklist — which publishes tomorrow, so watch this house. As in previous years, this course of included loads of debate inside the workforce about which eating places really feel most important and which cooks most deserve consideration proper now. However confronted with spectacular meals at locations like Potential New Boyfriend that defy simple definition, the workforce returned to the Large Query requested in numerous assume items through the years: What makes a restaurant a restaurant, anyway?
“We actually noticed a necessity for an area that served extra roles than a standard cocktail bar or a standard restaurant or a standard espresso store,” says Bryce Summers, a accomplice at Cuties, an all-day bar in Portland, Maine, that’s open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. “There’s tons of actually phenomenal, distinctive choices for all of these issues within the Previous Port and Portland as an entire, however there was actually missing an area that form of bridged the hole between them.”
The bar serves cocktails alongside cortados throughout the day, whereas the meals menu transitions from egg and cheese “McGriddles” for lunch to “snacks for dinner” like coconut shrimp toast crab chips. The house — floor-to-ceiling home windows that allow in plenty of daylight, a neon signal on the backbar that sparkles on to announce the night — slides fluidly from morning to nighttime. Cuties attracts clients who could be searching for a restaurant, bar, or restaurant, tripling its buyer base, and it could actually appeal to the identical clients again for all three providers. “It offers us loads of alternative to supply plenty of various things. Your web will get solid lots wider,” Summers says.
That’s true for Evelyn Garcia and Henry Lu of Third Place in Houston too. The Prime Chef alumni, who collectively run Latin-Southeast Asian restaurant Jūn, opened Third Place — an unmistakable business buzzword — as a restaurant, serving espresso drinks and pastries, to monetize the restaurant house throughout the day. The duo wished to develop their attain by bringing in clients who may in any other case be intimidated by a sit-down meal at Jūn.
“We’re transferring away from simply being an important day vacation spot and extra embedded into our neighborhood,” Lu says.
The cafe is simply the beginning, anchoring a a lot bigger venture that has broad attraction for a spread of consumers. A chef residency program brings in rotating pop-ups, native artisans (pottery makers, florists, jewellery makers) maintain workshops within the house, and a craft desk permits distant employees to burn off some inventive steam all through the workday. “So many new espresso outlets flip right into a cafe-slash-bar now,” Lu says. “You’re making an attempt to faucet into loads of completely different markets as a result of lease’s not getting any cheaper. Everyone seems to be simply considering exterior of the field to attempt to hold their desires alive.”
For the Cuties workforce, the tough financial waters have been barely completely different. After Bon Appétit named Portland its Restaurant Metropolis of the 12 months in 2018 and a post-COVID increase stuffed town with rivals, Summers says, “all-day bar” was an open lane in an overheated market. It’s not a revolutionary idea but it surely’s new for Portland. “It’s an bold endeavor when it comes to scope, but it surely units us aside in a giant means,” Summers says.
These venues fulfill extra than simply the will for good meals. “I wish to deliver within the issues that I’m personally searching for, to really feel extra inventive exterior of meals and out of doors of my office,” Garcia says. “I would like artwork exhibits. I would like pottery. I would like flowers. I would like issues that individuals can come and revel in.”
“We created an area that we at all times wished, that we might’ve liked to see on the market on this planet,” Lu provides. “So the phrase ‘third place’ simply made loads of sense.”
“Third place” usually describes an off-the-cuff house for socializing that isn’t house or work. The time period gained traction as an antidote to social isolation introduced on by the COVID pandemic, although some, like former Eater correspondent Jaya Saxena, argue the time period has turn into overused and ambiguous as operators and commentators apply it to areas that look nothing alike. Critics recommend that third locations must be free for guests to take pleasure in; by that definition all eating places and bars would fail. But its broader definition displays the mission of the Cuties workforce to fill a void within the Previous Port and the group vibe encapsulated at Potential New Boyfriend.
It’s additionally the driving drive at the Wren, a brand new bar and lounge in Baltimore, which homeowners Will Mester, Millie Powell, and Rosemary Liss modeled after Irish and British pubs, the place the main focus is extra on socializing than eating.
“We actually simply wished it to be fairly an easy gastropub,” Mester says. “In an ideal world, I’d be tremendous with only a bar as a result of it’s a way more versatile association. I like the thought of possibly cooking a pair issues a pair days every week and having the Wren largely perform for drinks. But it surely’s not attainable to do with the mortgage. And no person would present up.”
Utilizing two induction hobs and a convection oven in a nook of the bar, Mester prepares considerate renditions of lamb mince, toasties, or a terrine with brown bread. The workforce by no means supposed for the Wren to be a full restaurant, however the New York Occasions and Bon Appétit named it to their 2025 greatest new eating places lists, which has modified the informal, social environment. The house has needed to change too; initially the workforce deliberate to chop the house in half, utilizing the entrance bar for eating and the again lounge, designed with low tables and stools, only for drinks. Prospects had different concepts.
“People don’t like guidelines,” Mester says, so now the workforce serves meals in each rooms. Cooking within the nook of the bar additionally turns into more difficult when a line of consumers out the door has examine dishes in nationwide publications. “It was tremendous, actually, till we’ve been remarkably busy,” Mester says. “That’s form of examined the boundaries of what we will do again there. So to some extent we’ve additionally needed to assemble the menu to accommodate that.”
Mester is frank about this evolution. “You must flip it over to the general public sooner or later, see what it does, after which see how one can succeed with it,” he says.
In related methods, the groups at Cuties, Potential New Boyfriend, and Third Place have all needed to negotiate their areas and choices with their clients. “I assumed that the hi-fi listening facet can be actually a giant focus and I nonetheless need it to be,” Disco says. “However — and you may see it in likes on Instagram posts — the factor that attracts folks in is the desserts by far. So now we have to regulate. It’s nice what we wish to provide, but it surely’s as much as individuals who are available in to inform us what they need, and we’re adjusting to that.”
That is true of all eating places: Cooks and homeowners have to answer their native markets. It ought to come as no shock that they should play to developments (Garcia and Lu serve loads of matcha; the Dubai chocolate sundae at Potential New Boyfriend has confirmed well-liked) and shift menus based mostly on what’s promoting (a well-executed aguachile got here off the Cuties menu, whereas lunch now contains extra sandwiches). Nonetheless, the relaxed, unstructured, community-focused format of those venues makes them particularly conscious of clients and moldable to their shifting needs and desires.
On the similar time, homeowners can’t at all times let clients fully take over their areas that appear to ask free use. “On the finish of the day, we have to flip tables, and that’s difficult,” Disco says. “I’ve been debating how you can navigate, , two gal friends which have a glass of wine and sit for 2 hours. How do you deal with that on a Friday night time when there’s like a line out the door? We do stay in a capitalist society, and we do must form of discover the stability.”
There’s a studying curve on either side. Prospects study what to anticipate — rotating lunch specials from pop-up cooks at Third Place, seated service at Potential New Boyfriend regardless of the relaxed house — whereas operators learn to meet audiences the place they’re. Collectively, the 2 sides can attain one thing completely attuned to the second.
“This restaurant isn’t only a restaurant anymore,” Lu says. “Individuals aren’t simply coming for the meals that we’re creating, however the way of life that we’re creating for the group. Every little thing is a vibe now.”
