when you want, where you want.
The Hillstoning of New York
Illustration: Arnaud Boutin
It’s Sunday night and Ashwin Deshmukh, an owner of Jean’s in Nolita, is sitting down at the bar of the Hillstone on Park Avenue while taking in the scene. “There’s dates, there’s solo diners, there’s families, there’s corporate accounts,” he says, scanning the dark, vast dining room’s many leather booths. “I just saw someone who owns a sports team.” As with other hot restaurants in New York, reservations at Hillstone were almost impossible to come by — the restaurant was booked solid until the following afternoon. “How many restaurants near 29th and Park can say that?” Deshmukh asks.
The Hillstone Restaurant Group got its start in Nashville nearly 50 years ago and now runs 40 restaurants around the country. Because many of the outposts operate under different names — Houston’s, Honor Bar, the Rutherford Grill, the East Hampton Grill — the company manages to avoid some of the stigma that has historically been attached to “chain restaurants.” They also keep location numbers low within each metropolitan area. At the only Hillstone in New York City, the well-honed formula works. “They’re a better bar than most bars,” Deshmukh says. “They’re a better value proposition than most value places. And they’re a better fine-dining place than most fine-dining places.”
Hillstone may not really be “America’s favorite restaurant” — as Bon Appétit called it in 2016 — but it is undeniably successful, and, like Deshmukh, the city’s restaurant owners have taken notice. Lately, they’ve also been lifting ideas from the kitchen, from the bar, and from the service staff — members of whom they are also happy to hire outright. There may be just one Hillstone in New York, but its influence is everywhere.
“Anyone who doesn’t admit that Hillstone was on their mood board is lying,” says Kyle Hotchkiss Carone, an owner of American Bar in the West Village. “We are 100 percent inspired by them.” Though his menu doesn’t borrow famous items wholesale — unlike spots such as Nightly’s, Maison Pickle, or the Corner Store, where French dips, grilled artichokes, and spinach dip with tortilla chips are all accounted for — American Bar does offer Hillstone-adjacent Asian salads and Hillstone-core hot fudge for dessert. But Hotchkiss Carone was most interested in capturing the chain’s essence: consistent, affordable, timeless, and crowd-pleasing.
When the chef Alex Stupak opened Empellón in midtown in 2017, he soon became a regular at a Hillstone location nearby. Stupak loved the mix on the menu: colcannon from Ireland, a French dip (invented in L.A.), and sushi listed above a section called “firsts.” “They’re taking everyone’s favorite stuff and putting it together,” Stupak says. “It’s weird, but it’s also extremely American.” He put that sensibility to work at his own American restaurant, Mischa (which was briefly home to the city’s most famous hot dog). That restaurant, like the midtown Hillstone, has since closed, but Stupak blames the location, not the idea. “I am going to do an American restaurant again,” he says.
One reason chefs are drawn to Hillstone is that it’s reliable. “They’re not making the most elevated food,” says Jeremiah Stone, an owner of the Manhattan restaurants Wildair and Bar Contra. “But you have to be impressed with the volume and the consistency.” Stone, a career chef whose restaurants are best known for their orange wines and potato-flavored desserts, isn’t the kind of person you’d think to associate with any chain. And yet his first restaurant job was at a Houston’s in Maryland, where he cobbled together Long Island iced teas in the back because he had only recently graduated high school. “It was the nicest place that I have ever eaten or worked,” he says. “It set a standard in my mind.”
He says that a vegetarian burger he serves at Day June Luncheonette was inspired by a similar sandwich at Hillstone, as are lemons outfitted with small elastic nets he serves with grilled fish, a trick from Houston’s. Hillstone similarly swayed his menus at the country bars Ray’s and his high-end brasserie, Brass.
That the chain’s sensibilities can seamlessly reach across such varied businesses speaks to its breadth. It’s also vast, and sometimes the adoption of a Hillstone trick can be unintentional: Moe Aljaff, an owner of the East Village–via–Barcelona cocktail bar Schmuck, has never dined at Hillstone. But his martini service instantly drew comparisons to it, even if it left him confused. (“I’ve never been to Hillstone,” he says. “It’s a restaurant?”) The move is hard to miss, though: Aljaff’s bartenders keep a close eye on customers’ martinis and swoop in as drinks defrost to swap out the glasses for fresh, chilled ones. Anyone who’s been to a Hillstone will tell you that its bartenders famously employ the same maneuver. Aljaff says he picked up the trick from a bartender in Barcelona in 2019, but since learning that Hillstone popularized it here, he’s made peace with its possible origins. “That’s probably how it got to us,” he says. “The bar industry is so tiny.”
It’s also likely someone saw the move online. One reason for the chain’s cultural resurgence in recent years — aside from its popularity with restaurant workers and journalists — is its popularity among New York transplants who document their meals on social media, where familiarity and novelty are keys to unlocking engagement.
“You’ve seen a return to comfort be one of the defining themes of the post COVID era,” says Halley Chambers, an owner of Margot in Fort Greene. Small plates are out, steakhouselike bounty is in, and value is a very real calculus for dining out. “I do think it’s kind of reactionary,” she says. And Hillstone manages to find exactly the right balance between “casual” and “nice.” When Chambers was celebrating her birthday this winter, she started with drinks at Andrew Tarlow’s Borgo, but for dinner, she went down the street to Hillstone. “You can be from Kansas City and get treated exactly the same as if you were anyone else,” she says. “That anonymity and sameness is comforting.”
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