The Great Restaurant Copy-Paste: Tuna Tartar Everywhere

Walk into a new bar in any reasonably sentient neighborhood and you can play a reliable game: spot the tuna tartare before you sit down. It will be “diced by hand,” “barely kissed,” and arranged in a neat cylinder, as if geometry were a seasoning. Nearby, croquettes will arrive as a concept album—kimchi croquettes, oxtail croquettes, croquettes that taste like the chef’s childhood and cost like his rent. Avocado will be present in multiple “textures,” which is hospitality’s way of admitting it had nothing better to do. Dessert? Torrijas, reborn as a lifestyle: brioche, foam, smoke, a drizzle of something called “salted caramel” that has never seen salt or caramel in the wild.

None of this is bad, exactly. The problem is that it’s everywhere, which makes it less a cuisine than a uniform. The modern menu has become a set of safe signals—instagrammable, easily explained, hard to hate, and impossible to remember. It’s not that chefs lack talent; it’s that the industry has learned to fear silence. A “normal” dish—lentils, roast chicken, a good piece of fish with nothing but oil and heat—doesn’t perform enough. It doesn’t wink. It doesn’t arrive with a story. It can’t be labeled “rogue,” “cheeky,” or “canalla,” words that now function like incense: they perfume the room while masking the lack of air.

What’s rare, increasingly, is not innovation but restraint: a place that cooks plainly, chooses carefully, and lets the food be the point. No lectures. No theatrics. Just dinner—quietly excellent, almost suspiciously so.