Champagne in Dixie Cups. Pancakes Flecked With Gold. Fine Dining Gets Fun Again.

A two-year pandemic closure had given the chef and his team time to think about the future of Pineapple & Pearls and the point of its existence. “You hear the words ‘fine dining’ and it’s a three- or four-hour meal and you’re worshiping at the temple of some chef,” Mr. Silverman said. “That’s not fun, at least for us.”

And so Pineapple & Pearls was reborn last May as something rather rare in today’s fine-dining landscape: a place where the operative principle is that everyone, at all times, should be having a blast. Still unquestionably high-end, it charges $345 per person before beverages, tax or a service charge. But the hourslong tasting-menu has left the building. Dinner is a mere four courses, with a choice between two options for each of them. 

A giant cluster of helium balloons hovers below the dining-room ceiling, and the wait staff buzzes about in custom red-velvet tuxedo jackets over vintage T-shirts, proffering caviar bumps or, depending on the evening, maybe Dixie cups of Dom Pérignon. Any birthday boy or girl gets a short stack of funfetti pancakes, drizzled with maple syrup flecked with 24-karat gold leaf. A little gaudy? Yes. But also unapologetically fun. 

Right to left: At Pineapple & Pearls, dining room captain Ben Loman serves the Soufflé of the Year; guests enjoy the Marine Barracks Artillery Punch.

For a long time now, a certain ambience has prevailed within the upper echelons of American fine dining: earnest, cerebral, elegant. Lengthy tasting menus have proliferated, of the kind referred to euphemistically on restaurant websites and Instagram feeds as an “experience” or a “journey.” A meal might include a local ecology lesson, or enough personal information about the chef to fill out an online dating profile. Typically, the décor is understated but obviously expensive, the lines clean, the lighting moody. 

Lately, though, a new vibe is taking hold, and the revamped Pineapple & Pearls exemplifies it. “Our music is a super-party-music playlist,” Mr. Silverman said. “It’s high-energy. Loud.” Cooks have been known to pull up a chair and chat with diners; guests sometimes get behind the bar to mix their own drinks. After the meal, rather than the chocolate truffles or sachet of housemade granola you might get at another fine-dining restaurant, diners are sent off with juicy greasy Wagyu cheeseburgers for a midnight snack. 

Right to left: Pineapple & Pearls bartender Ridley Williams serves the Salad Course cocktail; Chef de partie Gabriel Eguino prepares the Eastern Shore ‘Crab Feast’ at Pineapple & Pearls.

That Mr. Silverman chose to 86 the tasting menu that earned him two Michelin stars is significant at a time when fine dining has so universally adopted the format that it seems essential to the category. Yet Western tasting menus date back only to the late 1960s, when France’s nouvelle cuisine chefs began to offer multicourse “menus dégustation” loosely based on Japan’s kaiseki tradition. (See “How Tasting Menus Took Over,” below.)

These were six- or seven-course affairs; it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Catalan chef Ferran Adrià took that ball and ran with it, stretching the concept to dozens of dishes at his restaurant El Bulli, near the town of Roses, Spain. Young apprentices came to El Bulli from around the world, then traveled back to their home cities with juiced up creative ambitions, helping seed the globe with this particular style of dining. Today, chances are, if you’ve eaten at a restaurant that was both expensive and the subject of some degree of hype, it served a tasting menu.

But a certain fatigue appears to have settled in regarding how much a 12-, 16- or 21-course tasting menu demands of diners, not to mention the human cost of executing meals like this. Fine-dining restaurants around the world have long relied on stagiaires—interns who work without pay to gain experience—to do the labor-intensive prep work elaborate tasting menus demand. Chef René Redzepi of Noma, in Copenhagen—perhaps the world’s most prominent purveyor of highly wrought tasting menus—announced in January that the restaurant would close to regular service in 2024.

One measure of the zeitgeist shift: In 2015 the eyes of the world were on “Chef’s Table,” a

Netflix

documentary series delivering doting, soft-focus portraits of the world’s most inventive chefs. Today, everyone’s streaming “The Menu,” a comedy-horror in which a deranged celebrity chef uses a tasting menu to exact revenge on both his staff and diners. Some within the industry are experimenting with what comes next. If the old mode was brainy, reverential and chef-centric, the breakout new one is gleefully camp, flamboyant, maximalist.

At Dirty French Steakhouse, one of Miami’s hottest dinner tickets, servers wearing bow ties and powder-pink dinner jackets serve $85 prime rib in a mirrored, zebra-striped dining room that gives off what the restaurant blog “The Infatuation” called “cocaine dinner party energy.”

At Bad Roman, a recent New York City debut from the owners of the stately midtown steakhouse Smith & Wollensky, the dark-wood-paneling-and-oil-paintings aesthetic has given way to a wild pastiche of Italian decorative styles, pulling in mosaics, a fountain, coral-colored banquettes, lots of marble and a colossal boar statue on a plinth, flaunting a necklace of neon lights. 

And at Hi Felicia, in Oakland, Calif., chef-owner Imana, who goes by her first name only, offers what she terms “vulgar fine dining”: luxurious food in a space designed to be transgressive. “It’s completely black inside, with creepy clown paintings,” she said of the restaurant’s décor. “It looks like a haunted art gallery. It’s really tacky. It’s funky and bizarre and weird.” Hi Felicia, which started out as a pop-up, launched as a restaurant last April with a tasting menu priced at $195 but has since downshifted to a shorter, family-style format for $140. “There’s nothing about the food that isn’t elevated,” Imana said. “But we’re not stuffy, and I encourage the team to be as liberated as possible.” 

Restaurants don’t need a decorative scheme that’s tawdry or retro to telegraph the new energy. According to restaurateur Jeff Katz, when he and chef Melissa Rodriguez opened Al Coro, in New York City, last year, their goal was a high-end experience that broke intentionally from the city’s legacy-fine-dining scene. (The restaurant has since earned two Michelin stars.) They placed a four-piece band front and center, playing R&B and soul covers every night of the week. After dinner, guests can meander downstairs to Discolo, a “cocktail club” where the ceiling lights up and a DJ spins into the early hours of the morning. 

At Canlis, in Seattle, third-generation owners Brian and Mark Canlis are not about to plaster over their Don-Draper-cool dining room with creepy clown paintings. But the brothers have found other opportunities to let their freak flag fly. Canlis now hosts pop-ups in the restaurant’s lower parking lot; a recent example featured hot tubs, bonfires, pizza and a live indie-folk band, and proved so popular that the restaurant is planning to run a “hot tub concert series” all spring and summer. The 73-year old restaurant has a long tradition of glamorous New Year’s Eve fêtes, but in recent years, the night has taken a turn for the funky. This year’s theme was Space Prom, a high-energy dance party involving neon lasers and smoke machines. 

In some cases, breaking the fine-dining mold goes deeper than aesthetics. For Imana, creating a new setting for fancy food at Hi Felicia was a way of signaling that she had hit the reset button on industry norms she viewed as toxic. “There’s something super exhilarating about the old fine dining ways, but I had always thought that it was racist, sexist, ageist,” Imana said. “I was burned out on working for white men.” She assembled an all-Black management team at Hi Felicia and says she makes a point of taking chances on people in roles that are new to them.

The goal at Pineapple & Pearls, too, was as much about changing the mood for the people who work at the restaurant as those who eat there. “Why do we exist? We exist to make people happy,” Mr. Silverman said. “And that includes making ourselves happy, which is a part of this whole thing that a lot of people forget about.”

A two-year pandemic closure had given the chef and his team time to think about the future of Pineapple & Pearls and the point of its existence. “You hear the words ‘fine dining’ and it’s a three- or four-hour meal and you’re worshiping at the temple of some chef,” Mr. Silverman said. “That’s not fun, at least for us.”

And so Pineapple & Pearls was reborn last May as something rather rare in today’s fine-dining landscape: a place where the operative principle is that everyone, at all times, should be having a blast. Still unquestionably high-end, it charges $345 per person before beverages, tax or a service charge. But the hourslong tasting-menu has left the building. Dinner is a mere four courses, with a choice between two options for each of them. 

A giant cluster of helium balloons hovers below the dining-room ceiling, and the wait staff buzzes about in custom red-velvet tuxedo jackets over vintage T-shirts, proffering caviar bumps or, depending on the evening, maybe Dixie cups of Dom Pérignon. Any birthday boy or girl gets a short stack of funfetti pancakes, drizzled with maple syrup flecked with 24-karat gold leaf. A little gaudy? Yes. But also unapologetically fun. 

Right to left: At Pineapple & Pearls, dining room captain Ben Loman serves the Soufflé of the Year; guests enjoy the Marine Barracks Artillery Punch.

For a long time now, a certain ambience has prevailed within the upper echelons of American fine dining: earnest, cerebral, elegant. Lengthy tasting menus have proliferated, of the kind referred to euphemistically on restaurant websites and Instagram feeds as an “experience” or a “journey.” A meal might include a local ecology lesson, or enough personal information about the chef to fill out an online dating profile. Typically, the décor is understated but obviously expensive, the lines clean, the lighting moody. 

Lately, though, a new vibe is taking hold, and the revamped Pineapple & Pearls exemplifies it. “Our music is a super-party-music playlist,” Mr. Silverman said. “It’s high-energy. Loud.” Cooks have been known to pull up a chair and chat with diners; guests sometimes get behind the bar to mix their own drinks. After the meal, rather than the chocolate truffles or sachet of housemade granola you might get at another fine-dining restaurant, diners are sent off with juicy greasy Wagyu cheeseburgers for a midnight snack. 

Right to left: Pineapple & Pearls bartender Ridley Williams serves the Salad Course cocktail; Chef de partie Gabriel Eguino prepares the Eastern Shore ‘Crab Feast’ at Pineapple & Pearls.

That Mr. Silverman chose to 86 the tasting menu that earned him two Michelin stars is significant at a time when fine dining has so universally adopted the format that it seems essential to the category. Yet Western tasting menus date back only to the late 1960s, when France’s nouvelle cuisine chefs began to offer multicourse “menus dégustation” loosely based on Japan’s kaiseki tradition. (See “How Tasting Menus Took Over,” below.)

These were six- or seven-course affairs; it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Catalan chef Ferran Adrià took that ball and ran with it, stretching the concept to dozens of dishes at his restaurant El Bulli, near the town of Roses, Spain. Young apprentices came to El Bulli from around the world, then traveled back to their home cities with juiced up creative ambitions, helping seed the globe with this particular style of dining. Today, chances are, if you’ve eaten at a restaurant that was both expensive and the subject of some degree of hype, it served a tasting menu.

But a certain fatigue appears to have settled in regarding how much a 12-, 16- or 21-course tasting menu demands of diners, not to mention the human cost of executing meals like this. Fine-dining restaurants around the world have long relied on stagiaires—interns who work without pay to gain experience—to do the labor-intensive prep work elaborate tasting menus demand. Chef René Redzepi of Noma, in Copenhagen—perhaps the world’s most prominent purveyor of highly wrought tasting menus—announced in January that the restaurant would close to regular service in 2024.

One measure of the zeitgeist shift: In 2015 the eyes of the world were on “Chef’s Table,” a

Netflix

documentary series delivering doting, soft-focus portraits of the world’s most inventive chefs. Today, everyone’s streaming “The Menu,” a comedy-horror in which a deranged celebrity chef uses a tasting menu to exact revenge on both his staff and diners. Some within the industry are experimenting with what comes next. If the old mode was brainy, reverential and chef-centric, the breakout new one is gleefully camp, flamboyant, maximalist.

At Dirty French Steakhouse, one of Miami’s hottest dinner tickets, servers wearing bow ties and powder-pink dinner jackets serve $85 prime rib in a mirrored, zebra-striped dining room that gives off what the restaurant blog “The Infatuation” called “cocaine dinner party energy.”

At Bad Roman, a recent New York City debut from the owners of the stately midtown steakhouse Smith & Wollensky, the dark-wood-paneling-and-oil-paintings aesthetic has given way to a wild pastiche of Italian decorative styles, pulling in mosaics, a fountain, coral-colored banquettes, lots of marble and a colossal boar statue on a plinth, flaunting a necklace of neon lights. 

And at Hi Felicia, in Oakland, Calif., chef-owner Imana, who goes by her first name only, offers what she terms “vulgar fine dining”: luxurious food in a space designed to be transgressive. “It’s completely black inside, with creepy clown paintings,” she said of the restaurant’s décor. “It looks like a haunted art gallery. It’s really tacky. It’s funky and bizarre and weird.” Hi Felicia, which started out as a pop-up, launched as a restaurant last April with a tasting menu priced at $195 but has since downshifted to a shorter, family-style format for $140. “There’s nothing about the food that isn’t elevated,” Imana said. “But we’re not stuffy, and I encourage the team to be as liberated as possible.” 

Restaurants don’t need a decorative scheme that’s tawdry or retro to telegraph the new energy. According to restaurateur Jeff Katz, when he and chef Melissa Rodriguez opened Al Coro, in New York City, last year, their goal was a high-end experience that broke intentionally from the city’s legacy-fine-dining scene. (The restaurant has since earned two Michelin stars.) They placed a four-piece band front and center, playing R&B and soul covers every night of the week. After dinner, guests can meander downstairs to Discolo, a “cocktail club” where the ceiling lights up and a DJ spins into the early hours of the morning. 

At Canlis, in Seattle, third-generation owners Brian and Mark Canlis are not about to plaster over their Don-Draper-cool dining room with creepy clown paintings. But the brothers have found other opportunities to let their freak flag fly. Canlis now hosts pop-ups in the restaurant’s lower parking lot; a recent example featured hot tubs, bonfires, pizza and a live indie-folk band, and proved so popular that the restaurant is planning to run a “hot tub concert series” all spring and summer. The 73-year old restaurant has a long tradition of glamorous New Year’s Eve fêtes, but in recent years, the night has taken a turn for the funky. This year’s theme was Space Prom, a high-energy dance party involving neon lasers and smoke machines. 

In some cases, breaking the fine-dining mold goes deeper than aesthetics. For Imana, creating a new setting for fancy food at Hi Felicia was a way of signaling that she had hit the reset button on industry norms she viewed as toxic. “There’s something super exhilarating about the old fine dining ways, but I had always thought that it was racist, sexist, ageist,” Imana said. “I was burned out on working for white men.” She assembled an all-Black management team at Hi Felicia and says she makes a point of taking chances on people in roles that are new to them.

The goal at Pineapple & Pearls, too, was as much about changing the mood for the people who work at the restaurant as those who eat there. “Why do we exist? We exist to make people happy,” Mr. Silverman said. “And that includes making ourselves happy, which is a part of this whole thing that a lot of people forget about.”