Thoughts On The Same-ification of NYC
A Pura Vida for everyone and drinks at Le Dive for the rest of your life.
My local slice shop just shut down. It’s being replaced by Luckin Coffee, a Chinese chain that’s opened 18 NYC locations since last summer. If I prefer, there’s also a Blank Street Coffee a few blocks east, a Starbucks two blocks south, a La Colombe around the corner, a Joe & the Juice 100 yards away, and a Gregory’s Coffee right across the street.
I don’t mean to be alarmist, but from where I’m sitting—working from home, within 1,000 feet of a Chopt, Just Salad, Sweetgreen, and Cava—the city does seem to be losing some character. In our roundup of the Q2 dining trends of 2026, we labeled this phenomenon the same-ification of NYC.
Of course, Starbucks and Sweetgreen aren’t anything new, and Luckin Coffee already has over 30,000 outposts worldwide (mostly in China). What makes the present situation interesting is that so many upstarts are making the leap from one or two locations to four, five, or, in the case of 7th Street Burger, 24 locations in NYC alone. Whether they’re selling bagels, smashburgers, or kale caesar wraps, the blossoming chains of the 2020s are expanding at an unusually rapid pace.
Wonder is the most egregious example. The delivery-and-takeout operation offering grim simulacra of restaurant-quality dishes has launched 25+ NYC storefronts since 2023. There’s also PopUp Bagels, Little Ruby’s, Pura Vida, and Skinny Louie, which is about to open its fourth and fifth smashburger shops since arriving from Miami last year.
When discussing restaurant trends last spring, I asked, “In five years, will every neighborhood look the same?” I’m leaning toward yes.
Is this a bad thing?
The answer is obviously subjective. I’m not a fan of PopUp (largely because they refuse to sell individual bagels), but I know some people who are. It’s also complicated. We can’t throw all of these chains and mini-chains into the same bucket.
When a second Bar Pisellino opens in Flatiron next year, you’ll probably find me drinking there. And I’ve already been to the new Le Dive several times. It’s just a block from the West Village location of Apollo Bagels. I’m a fan of that place too, but good as the bagels are, I’d rather not see them in every neighborhood. What I’m saying is: patronize your little neighborhood spots before it’s too late. Same-ification is coming for you. Best-case scenario, you get a Mariscos El Submarino. The worst case is obviously Wonder. —Bryan Kim
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Call me old, but I think two restaurants are a chain. It's hard for Infatuation to make the case against same-ification when almost every review of a new restaurant has phrases like "from the folks who brought you..." or "the team behind bla-bla-bla have finally opened a 2nd/3rd/4th/nth outpost in Midwood/Spuyten Duyvil/The Hole/across from the Hertz Rent-a-Car at JFK." Chains of frozen yogurt shops and coffee shops are inevitable, given Margaret's points above, but that doesn't necessarily translate into everyone having to dine at barely different versions of the same twenty restaurants. Hyperbole in a city as big and diverse as NYC? Probably -- but you brought the subject up so there must be something there.
OF COURSE IT'S A BAD THING AND YES I KNOW I AM SHOUTING. No one moves to New York so they can go to any of these places. Come on.