A City of Swankstaurants

They're smaller and more exclusive than steakhouses and offer food that is (sometimes) more interesting.

- BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

The upstairs dining room at Chateau Royale.

THE PENDULUM swings from cheap to swank and back again. I'll leave it to the economists to tie the trend to jobs numbers or inflation data, the bread-and-butter equivalent of the hemline index (they're shorter in booms, longer during busts). All I know is that the rough-and-ready comfort cuisine that dominated the crawl out of the pandemic a few years ago, a banquet-orgy of steaks, shrimp cocktails, and Caesar salads served in shouty canteens and new bistros manicured with the scabs of old ones, has given way to a new age of gloss. Fancy fancy? You're in luck. Now ascendant: the swankstaurant.