What NYC’s Top Restaurants Torrisi, Coqodaq, Corner Store, More Have in Common

It’s a Monday night at Torrisi in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, and the brick-lined dining room is packed. At one table, a cashmere-clad young couple gleefully plots a coming vacation. At a round banquette, a group of older women in blazers clink glasses over a big birthday. Rows of guys directly in from finance jobs wave around big watches. The buzz is energetic; laughter ripples around the room. Our server, a smiling goateed guy in a cream-colored tuxedo jacket, comes by. “Hi,” he says, leaning in. “I’m Fernando, and we’re going to have fun tonight.” I have to believe him: Every table is celebrating. And it’s only 5:30 p.m. on the slowest restaurant night of the week.

“We call it ‘Torrisi, the Musical,’” says Rich Torrisi, the chef behind this dynamic Italian American sibling of the world-famous Carbone, who stops by our table. “We make everyone feel like they’re part of the show, and that we’re celebrating with them.”

The music rises ever so slowly through speakers subtly positioned high along the walls, until eventually the energy reaches concert levels. After all, on a given night, the waitlist to get in can top 7,300—double the number of seats at Carnegie Hall.

As insane as the demand is, Torrisi isn’t alone. It’s one of a tiny tier of New York restaurants whose seats are so coveted that Saturday Night Live producers will attempt to trade show tickets for reservations. (That’s happened at Chez Fifi uptown.) “You may have an Amex black card, or a big J.P. Morgan account. But nothing screams ‘I have social clout’ like an 8 p.m. table,” says Simon Kim, founder of Gracious Hospitality Management. “It’s never been harder to get reservations in New York City.”

Kim’s dining rooms include Coqodaq (where 1,500 people are usually on the nightly waitlist for Korean fried chicken and Champagne) and the glam Cote Korean Steakhouse (about 2,000). They’re among the eight or so places—including the sultry Bridges down in Chinatown, the cozy wood-paneled Le Veau d’Or uptown and the ’80s-flashback-vibed the Corner Store in SoHo—that represent the hottest tables in not just New York but, I’d confidently argue, the world.

In the past few months, I’ve eaten in Paris, Tokyo and London, where I live. Nothing, not even traveling for a pop-up of the world-renowned Noma in Kyoto, approached the level of envy I earned by scoring that 5:30 table at Torrisi.

“You can’t touch New York right now,” says Marc Lotenberg, the co-founder of members-only reservation platform Dorsia, which raised $50 million in February and operates in 21 markets worldwide, including Miami, Dubai and Ibiza. “Dining is the new nightlife. That’s especially true in New York.” Or, as Corner Store co-founder and partner and Catch Restaurant Group partner Eugene Remm puts it: “It’s the hunger games here now.”

Of course, the city’s high-end restaurants have long been premium places to see and be seen, starting with the original Delmonico’s in the late 1820s through power lunches at the Four Seasons in the 1970s and Balthazar in SoHo in the ’90s. Jack Dempsey’s and Lüchow’s—restaurants that ruled the roost after Prohibition—had equally avid audiences. Chef Mario Carbone, co-founder of Major Food Group, which owns Carbone and Torrisi, says top restaurants “have always been hard to get into. We just now have a much larger forum—social media—to complain about it.”

Call it the TikTok effect. Angie Rito, the co-chef and co-owner of another Italian American hot spot, Don Angie, says it has broadened the audience of diners geographically and generationally. More people know about these places than ever before and want to participate. Which leads to another new phenomenon, Rito says: “People didn’t use to stand in line.”

So what’s the winning formula for a top-tier place like hers, one that attracts diners across an array of demographics? It’s an almost mystical combination of buzzy energy plus good—often great—food, supercharged with cozily familiar hospitality. Underpinning this delicate concoction are interiors designed to be cool but not trendy, delivering an immersive sense of authenticity even at brand-new establishments.

Here are five key elements.

The minute you walk into Coqodaq, there’s an electricity—as if you’ve arrived at the club. Most tables sit along an aisle that functions like a fashion runway, complete with glowing arches to glide through. There are constant cries of recognition from tables watching the scene: At all of these hot new restaurants, the ability to scope out people as they enter is carefully orchestrated by the designers, including Le Veau d’Or’s elevated entrance and Corner Store’s long, narrow layout. To accompany Coqodaq’s signature fried chicken—it arrives in a ceramic bucket, glistening and thick‑crusted—there’s a list of supplemental dishes for big spenders. An $870 tin of beluga caviar pairs well with the place’s notable Champagnes (it has the largest list in the US).

It all amps up the celebratory vibe. You may not realize that the music gets louder and faster as the night wears on, but you will notice you’re having fun.

At SoHo’s groovy Corner Store, there’s invariably a line down the block by 5 p.m. If the would-be customers make it inside, they’ll find design themes shared widely across this field: soft, golden lighting that evokes the hours right before sunset; a medley of banquettes and tables that bring to mind a classic Gotham hangout; an array of bric-a-brac on the walls. (See also the horse paintings at the Polo Bar, the ship images dominating 4 Charles Prime Rib and the mishmash of mirrors and artworks on the walls at Le Veau d’Or.)

Checkered marble floors are another throwback theme, plus mahogany-brown wood paneling, upholstered seats, deep red and green tones, and art deco accents. It feels busy but not fussy, and the mix of textures (and discreet sound-dampening panels) stops the din from growing deafening.

The Corner Store’s setup comes courtesy of celebrated designer David Rockwell, who also fashioned the grand bronzed interior at Coqodaq. “We set about creating a story that celebrates all of the best eccentricities and is rooted in a sense of both time and place,” he says. (Like chef Torrisi, he views restaurants as a chance to put on a show: “We really look at the merger between theater and architecture, in which we view all the individual elements of the restaurant as the script.”)

At elite places everywhere, waiters, hosts and bartenders have always been an essential part of the equation, but the style of service has changed. The key used to be making customers feel as if they were being respectfully—even fearfully—coddled, like the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey. (That, or condescended to.)

Now the top spots employ people you want to hang out with. At Bridges, a Chinatown canteen that opened last fall, the crowd looks as if they’re on the first leg of a fun night out; so does the staff. They’re up for a chat without any off-putting pretension. If you’re deciding on a wine to complement one of chef Sam Lawrence’s modern American dishes—maybe the luxe sea urchin custard—a guy in a mohair sweater you wish you owned will pull up a chair and talk you through the great options.

Another commonality: the food’s accessibility. Whether the place features European or comfort Korean or an international mix, rarely will you find a dish that requires a translation or much explanation—though you can expect a twist.

At Torrisi, zeppoli, the classic Italian street-food dessert, are served crispy and hot, but savory instead of sweet, on a plate of deep-red cured Italian and American hams. At Corner Store the most popular appetizer is a five-cheese pizza roll—just like your mom used to microwave but much, much better. At Le Veau d’Or, oysters might come with a row of chubby sausages—because why not highlight a little-known French snack? And, of course, there are chef Seung Kyu Kim’s chicken nuggets with caviar at Coqodaq.

One difference from the buzziest places in the past is that owners now decline to pack their bars four and five customers deep. What once was a hallmark of a place like Balthazar—where you could easily wait 15 minutes to order a martini—has now almost vanished. That’s in part because you won’t get past the host stand at Torrisi, Carbone or the Polo Bar if you don’t have a reservation. And by the way, you’re almost certainly not getting that res on Resy or OpenTable. The crowds at these places have the manager’s personal email, or they’re using platforms such as Dorsia to lock in a table at a promised price.

But assuming you’ve made it in, you’ll find a carefully curated room. The power seats change depending on the space: At Torrisi they’re the semicircular banquettes in the main room in the back; at Chez Fifi, where Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost and Chris Rock recently dined, the best seats are a pair of booths that operate as places where you can be seen but not interact with anyone.

The single greatest trick restaurateurs can pull is to keep that heat on a steady burn after the initial buzz has worn off. They do this by developing a base of regulars who came when a place was first hot and want to stick around.

“This idea of longevity is something we’ve tried to carry to Bridges in a big way,” co-owner Nicolas Mouchel says. Bridges keeps the bar and a few tables open every night to accommodate walk-ins and to be neighborhood-friendly. “Right now we might be popular, but in a dining scene as competitive as New York, the crowd inevitably moves on to the next new opening. Building a community takes time.”

The Corner Store’s Remm has another piece of advice for would-be NYC restaurateurs. “Don’t tell the city you’re a hot restaurant,” he says. And don’t deliberately set out to build one either: “A hot restaurant is a red flame.” That never lasts, he adds. “We want a blue flame; one that stays consistent for years.”