By Joshua David Stein
On a recent winter night, frost sparkled in the air like cold confetti and a warm glow spilled from the small windows of a tavern in the one-stoplight village of Sergeantsville, N.J.
Inside the Sergeantsville Inn, Shawn Lawson, the town ice-cream maker, sat next to Kathy Klink, a retired elementary school teacher and former town clerk, and Jacqueline Haut Evans, an artist and real-estate agent. At the other end of the bar, Jon Sheldrick, aka DJ Fuzzy, whose show broadcasts from the radio station across the street, had come in for a quick dinner. Haut Evans nursed a New York sour with a large ice cube. She's regularly stopped into the Sergeantsville Inn for the last 25 years. "It doesn't matter when I come in," she said. "I know I'm going to know somebody."
This year, as the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday, there are no parades planned for one of the country's most quintessential institutions: the tavern, a "third place" between home and work where a community can gather. By definition, occupying the gray area between a bar and a restaurant, taverns aren't fancy. You can drink a beer, order a burger and linger at a tavern. No one will kick you out after 90 minutes.
In recent times, taverns have faded alongside so many other relics of slow living. Thankfully, the trend is starting to reverse. Across the country, chefs are abandoning the Sisyphean task of running high-end big city restaurants and returning to why -- and what -- they started cooking. Here, the harbingers of the new golden age of the old-school American tavern.
A Tavern from the Ashes
On that snowy night in New Jersey, Sean Gray surveyed the dinner crowd from behind the kitchen door. Many in the food world know Gray for his tenure as executive chef at Momofuku Ko, David Chang's crown jewel, for over a decade. While working there in 2017, Gray bought a house in Sergeantsville and began to commute 1 1/2 hours to the city. Gray often hung out at the Sergeantsville Inn, because everyone in town did. It was the town's center of gravity. When it burned down in 2015, the community chipped in to rebuild.
"I was just a regular who would come in two to three times a week," he said. "No one even knew I worked in restaurants." By 2021, Gray was burned out from the commute and was looking to hit the brakes. He quit Momofuku Ko but when the chef at Sergeantsville Inn left, he stepped in and was soon moonlighting in the kitchen a few days a week. In 2024, he took over full-time as executive chef.
Gray serves notably less experimental cuisine than in his Ko days. "I joke that I use my dad's palate as a guide." There's a very good roast chicken sourced from a local farmer, a burger so delicious it remains off-menu ("Otherwise, that's all anyone orders"), a bone-in pork chop and onion rings.
What he may sacrifice in culinary experimentation, he more than makes up for as a tavern keeper by tapping into a sense of community he couldn't find in the sleek kitchens of New York. "There's been times where I've been here cooking, when the power has gone out and a bunch of regulars have gone out back and started working on the generator," he said. "No big deal."
Once a Tavern, Always a Tavern
Like Gray, the chef Clare de Boer spent many years working in a cramped -- and coveted -- New York restaurant: King, which she opened with two partners in the West Village in 2016. In 2021, while at her home in the Hudson Valley with her family, she received a phone call from the owner of a historic tavern building in Pine Plains, N.Y., a whistle-stop hamlet in Dutchess County. When she saw the space, she "was immediately charmed." Built in 1782, the 10,000-square-foot Stissing House, hosts one of America's first domed ballrooms on the second floor, but de Boer fell for the kitchen, which came outfitted with a wood hearth and a wood cooking fire. "It was a cook's dream," she said.
Opened in 2022, Stissing House leans into the building's history as a tavern as far back as the 18th century. De Boer focuses on the kind of fare a traveler craves when coming in from the cold: venison and Sherry pie, spit-roasted duck, cups of warming bone broth. De Boer also embraces a tavern's essential function as a community hub. "Over the last four years, the space has begged the question: How can we fill it with life?" Throughout the year, the tavern hosts crafts fairs, cooking classes, folk concerts and an annual Easter egg hunt. In other words: just the kind of events that have always taken place within those walls.
Home Coming
In 2021, chefs Jon Nodler and Sam Kincaid felt unmoored. Nodler's from Minnesota and Kincaid's from Wisconsin, but they'd moved to Philadelphia in 2012, where their restaurant, Cadence, ended up on major best-of lists.
"We were uncertain how to propel Cadence forward, while also creating time and space for ourselves," Nodler said. After closing Cadence, they moved back west and settled in New Glarus, Wis., a village about 30 miles from Madison. In October 2025, the couple opened Canter Inn in a restored Queen Anne-style building built in 1902. "We're the fourth-generation husband-and-wife to run a restaurant here," said Nodler.
On a recent wintry night, Nodler was excited to spot two familiar guests at a table enjoying chicken schnitzel and homemade milk bread: the butcher shop owner and town locksmith. "I call them the New Glarebrities, " he said.
Something for Everyone
While it certainly helps, you don't need to own a historic building to open a tavern. When Nashville-area chef Julia Sullivan was looking to open her second restaurant, she chose an abandoned laundromat from 1950 on the outskirts of Sewanee in rural Tennessee. The restaurant, Judith, opened in 2025 with a clear tagline: "an American tavern."
A long bar in the center of the room divides Judith into a casual bar area in the front and a slightly more formal dining room tucked behind. (Students of the nearby University of the South frequent the bar; the professors hang out in the back.)
"What a tavern conveys to me is that it is available for all kinds of times for all kinds of people," Sullivan said. These days, reservations are recommended but Sullivan holds space for walk-ins. The front bar invariably buzzes with locals looking for an after-work bite, hunters and hikers emerging from the Cumberland Plateau and even city folk who make the 1 1/2 -hour drive in search of connection. "I have people from Nashville tell me they run into more of their friends here than they do in the city," said Sullivan.
Big City, Small-Town Feeling
City taverns have had a harder time finding their modern footing. New York's White Horse Tavern, established in 1880, and Fraunces Tavern, site of Washington's 1783 farewell to his troops, have become so popular with tourists, they more closely resemble theme parks than local watering holes. Others, like Gramercy Tavern and Minetta Tavern in New York and the Blue Duck Tavern in Washington, D.C., have lost their everyman appeal, becoming impossible to get into and expensive to eat at.
But there is hope. At Gus' Sip & Dip, a newly opened tavern in Chicago that specializes in cocktails and French dip sandwiches, co-owner Bob Broskey offers "Gus' Coins," to regulars, which allows them to skip the line. In Brooklyn's waterfront Red Hook neighborhood, Billy Durney, of Red Hook Tavern, always holds a four-top and a pair of bar stools for locals who can call ahead to claim a spot. "Everyone who lives in the neighborhood has my number," he said. But what if you aren't a neighbor and you want that special treatment? Then you just have to do what taverngoers have done for the last 250 years: Show up and order a drink -- then do it again and again until everyone there knows your name.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 27, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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