On an unusually warm evening in the West Village, while other New Yorkers were walking their dogs outside in sneakers and T-shirts, a family of five sat soberly at the window of a formal dining room, each dressed in stylish blazers. A couple in a velvet corner cubicle wore suits—his navy blue, hers powder blue. Pearls glittered, freshly polished shoes glowed. When a fashionably dressed couple stopped to take a look at the menu, the sight was shocking: They were wearing jeans.
It was no coincidence that everyone in this restaurant, Les Trois Chevaux, was delighted. They had been instructed to do so in a text message that read like a manifesto the previous day.
“At Les Trois Chevaux, we respect the style and finesse that can only be attributed to having swagger in New York,” it said. “We expect our guests to arrive in appropriate dinner attire and celebrate the style that downtown New York City can bring.”
To avoid confusion, details followed: “Blue jeans, shorts and sneakers are strictly prohibited.” Diners were “kindly” requested to wear jackets. For those without a jacket, a vintage Yves Saint Laurent model would be provided. Something else? “Definitely no slippers,” the owner, Angie Mar, emphasized in an interview.
“What I’ve really missed in New York over the past five or six years is that old-fashioned flair that I love,” she said. “It’s important that we bring that back.”
During a pandemic in which many Americans have traded in their tailored pants for casual wear, dress codes are making an unexpected return to the dining room.
In the past two years, several new restaurants have opened across the country with expected dress policies, some strict (“luxury fashionable dress code highly enforced,” warns a text from Olivetta in Los Angeles) and some vague (“smart casual or better,” advises Catbird in Dallas).
Some are ambitious: “We expect our guests to do their best,” says Chicago-based Kitchen + Kocktails. Others seem to allude to a disturbing earlier incident: “Clothes that give off an unpleasant odor are not allowed” at Juliet’s in Houston.
Whatever the specifics, the calculation is the same – a belief that many guests are eager to get dressed again after an era of record-breaking sloppiness.
“Everywhere we went, people were walking around in sweatpants and T-shirts and their hair wasn’t done,” said Rosea Grady, the general manager of Thirteen, a high-end Houston restaurant founded by professional basketball player James Harden that ran in March 2021. †We wanted Thirteen to be a place where people give their best.”
A dress code also complements the luxurious environment, she added. “The building is beautiful. Our wallpaper is from Gucci.”
If this all sounds a bit exclusionary, in some places it’s meant to be. “My restaurants are not for everyone in terms of taste,” says Ms Mar of Les Trois Chevaux, who opened last July with a menu that runs to sumptuous dishes such as a mille-feuille pastry filled with foie gras.
Dress codes can also seem counterintuitive at a time when many diners have reacted angrily to other guidelines — such as requests to wear a face mask — and when even some formal restaurants with long-standing dress rules have relaxed them during the pandemic. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, in Manhattan, said he dropped the requirement for men to wear coats because it seemed unsanitary to share the restaurant’s loaner coats.
In recent years, the restaurant business has struggled with issues of equality and inclusion, and dress codes have again been criticized as a covert means of discriminating or treating customers arbitrarily. Last month, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted that she had been turned away from a Capital Grille in that city for wearing leggings, wondering “if the woman who came in immediately after me, whom I didn’t see coming back, was also refused service.” (The restaurant group said Monday that the woman had come in for takeout, but the president apologized to Ms. Lance Bottoms, and that it had updated the dress code and retrained staff to properly enforce.)
“Clothes represent a lot of contentious issues: gender identity and gender roles, race, class, status,” said Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. “If we can’t really talk openly about these issues, we struggle with proxies, like clothes.”
Some local governments have even stepped in to condemn a dress code. In the summer of 2020, Baltimore City Council passed a resolution calling on the Atlas Restaurant Group to lift its dress code after a black woman and her son, who was in sportswear, were barred from Ouzo Bay, while a white kid dressed the same way was already dining. (The restaurant group apologized and relaxed the code.)
Many restaurateurs point out that their dress policy is broadly worded so that they are not seen as racially coded or gender-specific. Some allow for more casual attire, such as jeans, short shirts, and mini skirts.
“It’s not stuffy,” Kim Walker said of the dress code at her Los Angeles rooftop lounge, Bar Lis. “But it urges people on, like, ‘Hey, I’m going home and getting a little dolled up.'”
Many diners don’t mind. Many seize the opportunity to brighten up.
Priscilla Von Sorella, a fashion designer in Manhattan, said she can dress beautifully to express unspoken gratitude for restaurants.
“They’ve really suffered a lot in the past two years,” she said. “When you enter their establishment, especially if it’s a nicer establishment, it’s a way of showing your token of appreciation and a level of respect.”
Marissa Hermer, owner of the Olivetta and Issima restaurants in Los Angeles, said diners often tell her that the restaurants’ dress requirements make them feel like part of a members-only club.
At Carte Blanche, a tasting menu restaurant in Dallas where the dress code suggests “polished casual” attire, chef and co-owner Casey La Rue said so many diners arrive overdressed that he’s considering opening another location with a more formal code. .
Obviously, he said, “there are people who want that experience.”
And then there are those who don’t. Musician and record producer William Wittman is still annoyed by the time he dined at Patsy’s, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, on a warm summer day in the early 1980s. The air conditioning didn’t work but the staff still insisted he wear a jacket.
“The idea that this somehow made their dining room classier under those circumstances is just ridiculous,” said Mr. Wittman.
Dress codes remain on the books at many restaurants with white tablecloths. Joel Montaniel, a founder of the reservation system SevenRooms, said he has seen clothing guidelines appear more often in booking confirmations since the pandemic closures.
But they are still a rarity. And because most are general suggestions rather than lists of dos and don’ts, deciding whether a particular restaurant meets them is often subjective.
Even Ms Mar, who sets explicit boundaries in Les Trois Chevaux, acknowledged that they are not uniformly enforced.
“There are rules and then there are rules,” she said. “You know when Tom Fontana comes here, he’s a local resident, he wrote ‘Oz’, he’s a good friend of our house. Tom comes, he forgets a coat, we close one eye.”
Flora, a Mexican restaurant in Houston, is banning gym clothes. But one owner, Grant Cooper, said guests dressed in athletic apparel from designers, such as Lululemon, could be admitted. “It’s about how the person kind of gets it going too,” he said.
At most restaurants, that phone call is often left to the employee at the counter. Some hosts said they felt burdened by the responsibility of making quick judgments about people’s outfits.
Until May last year, Julia Yaeger hosted a traditional French restaurant in Washington, DC. The dress code recommended jackets for men and business or formal attire for women.
“It was really uncomfortable, mainly because of the vagueness” of the guidelines, she said. “It felt like no one really knew what it meant.”
She felt particularly uncomfortable explaining the dress code to non-binary customers because it was worded so gender-specifically. When she asked other guests to put on a coat, some yelled at her.
It is difficult to separate dress codes from their history as a tool of division and control, said Mr. Thompson Ford, the Stanford law professor. Though they have existed throughout history, modern versions proliferated in the mid-20th century, when standards for proper public dress began to relax.
Dress codes, he said, were a “filtering device to make certain groups of people feel unwelcome, or to signal that this is not their kind of place.”
Andre M. Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has written about race and dress codes, is skeptical of current restaurant guidelines.
“I find it hard to find a dress code that isn’t fraught, but I’m also not saying that a restaurant shouldn’t inspire a certain kind of community,” he said. “I just think the way we define ‘community’ is often racist, sexist or homophobic.”
In May 2021, Monica Johnson, who works for the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, publicly complained that she had been denied entry to Le Bilboquet, a French bistro in Atlanta, for wearing a tracksuit while other diners were more dressed. casually. Days later, former Atlanta Hawks player Dominique Wilkins tweeted that the restaurant had turned him down for not following the dress code.
“I’ve eaten at some of the best restaurants in the world,” he wrote, “but to this day, I’ve never felt prejudice or rejected because of my skin color.” Le Bilboquet denied that it discriminated on any basis; it said it had revised its dress code, which still bans sportswear, and trains employees in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Ms Johnson says she is not against a dress code. “I just want them to be applied fairly,” she said.
James McGhee, the owner of Juliet, in Houston, said he had experienced discrimination in bars in the city that ban clothes like Air Jordans “to deter black people from coming.” But he has imposed his own dress code, which encourages “luxury attire,” without gender-specific requirements. Mr McGhee said he trains employees to respect different interpretations of “luxury”, including sneakers.
Some new restaurants proudly declare that they don’t tell their guests what to wear.
“We wanted to make it more accessible to everyone,” said Jennifer Tran, who opened Jeong, a Korean restaurant in Chicago, with her partner Dave Park, in 2019. People often call and ask if there is a dress code. “It’s always nice to be able to say to them, ‘No, feel free to come as you are.'”
But there are also drawbacks to this choice. Ms. Tran believes that a dress code is an unspoken criterion for restaurants seeking to earn Michelin stars.
In certain circles, a dress code will always matter, she said. You just have to decide if you’re okay with being outside of them.