When the James Beard Foundation announced its national culinary awards this summer, both the hospitality industry and the general public tuned in to see who topped the list in each category. Big winners included Los Angeles’s Kato for best wine program, Scotch Lodge in Portland, Ore., for outstanding bar, Philadelphia’s Kalaya for outstanding restaurant, and NYC’s Lei, which took home the prize as the country’s best new restaurant.
On one level, that last award was hardly surprising. Not long after it opened in mid-2025, Lei picked up glowing reviews in The New York Times — as an NYT Critic’s Pick — and The New Yorker, as well as positive writeups in places like Eater and TimeOut. In large part, the critics had already spoken. The JBF was simply confirming what a lot of influential diners with notebooks seemed to be thinking.
But if you’re someone who checks the fine print, you might have noticed something slightly unexpected about Lei’s prize. On its website, the country’s “best new restaurant” describes itself as a “wine bar.”
That’s not a completely new trend: Food-focused wine bars have been claiming more and more of the spotlight — and a similar share of the discourse — in recent years. That said, this award appears to mark its high point to date, at least Stateside. Insiders note that the movement of branding restaurants as wine bars is now spreading around the world, thanks to the many advantages it offers in terms of managing customer expectations, to say nothing of benefits to the bottom line.
Signals and Messaging
Jarl de Vries is managing director at two Amsterdam-based food and drink consultancies, Studio Numen and Cocktail Professor, which design and build beverage programs for both luxury hotel groups and private clients across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. In his eyes, calling a dining venue a “wine bar” is a growing trend globally. The term reassures customers about multiple aspects of the experience, he says.
“We see this more and more often, especially in the last couple of years, that places that are called wine bars actually do loads of other stuff, like food, bites, events, and whatnot,” he says. “Having good wine is a signal to guests that everything else is good.”
At Lei, the flaky shao bing, crunchy celtuce, and sweet-and-sour short rib might be the talk of the town, but the broad-reaching wine program is its raison d’être. “The wine list comes first; the food options were designed to eat well alongside a wide range of wine,” says a spokesperson for the restaurant.
For Jonathan Pogash, founder and owner of The Cocktail Guru, a bar and restaurant consultancy, the first big benefit to calling a dining venue a “wine bar” is about customer expectations. Above all, it creates the impression that dinner is not going to be overly formal or stuffy.
“What we see in this trend in these types of bars, even though they’re restaurants as well, is a different type of service. It signals a social experience. It’s just more casual and more open.”
“There is this trend towards the casualization of fine dining,” he says. “That is probably due to the economy and coming out of Covid and trying to compete.”
If the trend wasn’t exactly born then, it certainly seems to have picked up steam around that time. In The New York Times, Eric Asimov wrote about “full-fledged restaurants” calling themselves wine bars and what differentiates a wine bar from a restaurant in late 2022.
Of course, wine bars predate Covid by many decades, if not several centuries. What differs from an original bar à vin in the Old World — and the popular variations on that theme that spread across the U.S. in the first two decades of this century — is the heightened emphasis on high-level cooking that goes far beyond charcuterie and cheese boards.
In addition, de Vries notes, the global “restaurant as wine bar” trend has another quirk, often putting much more emphasis on natural, skin-contact, and low-intervention bottles.
“It’s a particular kind of direction of wine bars, rather than ‘wine’ in general,” he says.
Beyond the list, de Vries says that the global “wine bar” trend has a few particular characteristics that include high quality food in smaller portions that are designed around sharing, as well as a special approach at the front of house.
“What we see in this trend in these types of bars, even though they’re restaurants as well, is a different type of service,” he says. “It signals a social experience. It’s just more casual and more open.”
The design and atmosphere is often different, too, with a greater focus on conversation and conviviality. In short, the trend is not just about nomenclature. It’s an entire worldview.
“It basically extends to everything else in the venue,” he says. “Food, service, design, atmosphere. We see this quite often.”
Better Wines, Better Margins
In part, what you call your place is about creating expectations and atmosphere. But it can also be about cash flow.
One of the best new restaurants in the beautiful, canal-lined city of Bruges, Belgium, is Cult, a wine-forward venue which opened in late 2024. On its website, it describes itself as “Wijnbar & Apero, Restaurant,” covering three categories at once.
Co-founder Kees Dobbelaar says that Cult’s multi-part definition was inspired by his team’s earlier experience at Blend, a beloved and still-running local bar that initially had “almost no food,” frequently causing its guests to bail out after a drink or two, until Blend started serving small bites as well.
Although their new venue, Cult, has an extensive kitchen and serves dry-aged steaks, among other big-ticket fare, calling it a “wine bar” makes guests feel like they can come in at any time of day, for any reason.
“There’s no pressure at all,” he says. “If you want to come in for one glass, no problem. You want to have three glasses? Perfect, also fine. You can have three small snacks and one glass. Whatever.”
Ideally, he says, the term “wine bar” will reassure guests that they won’t have to order a three-course menu. “For us, one of the most important things is that it is very accessible.”
In terms of the menu, that accessibility includes tapas-style dishes, as well as small hot plates like garnished oysters and toasted brioche with smoked eel, which is sold as a perfect pairing for a glass of Champagne.
The term also helps keep things busy.
“In a restaurant, a table or a chair is used once for lunch and once for dinner,” he says. “In a wine bar, every seat is taken 10 times for service. That’s a different, more economic part of the job.”
Another economic advantage to branding a restaurant as a wine bar can be lower operating costs, Pogash adds. Putting the emphasis on wine can mean that operators don’t necessarily have to stock spirits, train staff on cocktails, or buy a pricey liquor license.
“There’s no pressure at all. If you want to come in for one glass, no problem. You want to have three glasses? Perfect, also fine. You can have three small snacks and one glass. Whatever.”
It can also change the expectation of how drinks are sold. That, too, can be part of the business plan.
“When I think of a ‘wine bar,’ I think of a glass of wine,” Pogash says. “Just from an operator’s standpoint, it’s probably more efficient to serve glasses — multiple glasses — than have people buy bottles. You’re going to get a better markup on your glasses of wine.”
Obligations to Tradition
Although “wine bar” might be a popular way to brand eating and drinking venues at the moment, many terms have similarly come into fashion and since disappeared. In the Western United States, the popularity of the term “saloon” declined precipitously after about 1900 or so, while Google Books Ngram Viewer shows a peak for “bar and grill” in 1944, a big slide in popularity until roughly 1977, another rise until 2012, followed by another slip. Pogash cites “kitchen and cocktails,” “bar and cocktails,” and “chophouse” as once-trendy names that hardly get used anymore.
Such changes regularly run through most segments of the drinks industry, in almost every country. In recent years, the U.K. has seen an increase in beer-focused venues that eschew the traditional term pub, instead calling themselves taprooms, even when they don’t actually brew their own beer. Daisy Turnell, co-owner and director at Tipple Marketing, cites it as another take on how self-branding can influence customer expectations, while also meaning fewer obligations to longstanding tradition for venue operators.
“I think that ‘taproom’ makes you think of a modern and innovative beer-focused venue,” she says. “It’s a bit more freeing than saying ‘pub,’ which can lead to a variety of expectations in advance.”
Regardless of what owners are choosing to call these venues, Pogash believes they’re mostly using the same winning formula.
“Whether it’s cocktails and food or wine and food, pairing food with drinks is huge,” he says. “That will pretty much never go away.”
