The Nines Kaspian Potato. Credit: Liz Clayman

From Caviar Potatoes to Meatball Parm: Inside NYC’s New Bar Snack Craze

10 Minute read

29 Sep 2025

Liz Provencher

Journalist

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Across New York, bars are rewriting the rules of the snack, serving everything from caviar-topped potatoes to late-night parm sandwiches—and drawing crowds as big as the city’s hottest restaurants.

Walking into a bar once meant hunching over a plate of chicken wings or reaching greasy fingers into a basket of fries. Now, at bars across New York, the food menu is dialed up in every conceivable way.

At Funny Bar, from the team behind Brooklyn’s indie music venue Baby’s All Right, you can tuck into a killer plate of steak frites before hitting the dance floor. At Tusk Bar, martinis arrive with a little bonus: a single perfect oyster topped with mignonette to slurp down after the gin and vermouth. And, unsurprisingly, things have gotten completely over the top—like a caviar-topped baked potato at The Nines or a $150 Wagyu katsu sandwich served in a golden takeout box at Sip & Guzzle.

This evolution of bar food means drinking dens are no longer just a place for a beer or an inventive cocktail—they’re veritable dining destinations, pulling in as many reservation requests as the hottest restaurants of the moment. That’s music to bar owners’ ears, who say the push toward food is driven by everything from a desire to get creative to changing business needs and guest expectations.

Stepping It Up

Chef Paul Carmichael knew the menu at Bar Kabawa—the daiquiri-focused sibling to his buzzy restaurant Kabawa—needed a few essentials. Bar food, he says, should be easy to eat, packed with savory punch, and textured enough to keep you reaching for more. But beyond that, all rules are out the window.

To check all the boxes, he landed on patties. The savory pastries, rooted in the Caribbean lens of the bar, let him flex his creativity with fillings like eggplant, tomato, and raclette or pepper pot duck and foie gras.

“If your mission for the night is just to drink, food becomes secondary—but still necessary,” Carmichael says. “Patties aren’t complicated, and that’s the great thing. The complexity can come in all kinds of ways.”

That same playful spirit carries over to Pearl Box, a ritzy bar above the restaurant Heroes. Chef Aaron Lirette says guests often order both a proper caviar service and the bar’s unserious bowl of sour gummy candy. For Lirette, who spent much of his career in Michelin-starred kitchens like Danny Meyer’s Green River in Chicago, the format shift has pushed him to think outside the box.

Pearl Box comes from Manhattan restaurateur Ariel Arce, who also owns Big Pearl Caviar—so an indulgent caviar service was a given. Rather than stick with the usual crème fraîche and chives, Lirette adds creative touches like a rich egg yolk purée. The rest of the menu riffs on familiar drinking cravings with dishes like chips and dip or Thai-style fried chicken dusted with rice vinegar powder, Szechuan chili, sugar, salt, and white pepper.

The bar’s candy bowl features an ever-changing mix of sweet-and-sour gummies sourced from around the world. Set beside a few martinis in the sultry, dimly lit room, it feels practically made for the camera. Lirette admits the dish requires little cheffing on his part, but says its lighthearted spirit is very much of the moment.

“It's the biggest seller,” he says. “Everything is so crazy in this world right now. People just want to let their guard down and act like kids.” Bars should be fun, after all.

Making It Work

With a name like Bar Snack, Iain Griffiths opened this East Village bar knowing a robust food menu was non-negotiable. But the decision also came down to business acumen: bolstering the menu can lead to real gains for a bar’s books.

“The check average thing is a huge point,” Griffiths says. “Rents are obviously sky high—the highest they’ve ever been—so you consider all the ways to get check averages past whatever your magic number is. Food is a great component of that.”

Bar Snack’s menu features fried cheese curds, shrimp cocktail, and a Spice Bag: chicken tenders, fries, and sautéed peppers and onions all shaken with spices and served with curry sauce for dipping. They’re decadent dishes that Griffiths says guests order more often than not, helping the business continue to thrive.

“More and more people are eating at the bar because they're not trying to plan a huge meal and they're not looking to spend $100 on food every time,” Griffiths says. “Bar food has organically stepped in to fill a hole there.”

Eric Madonna has seen the same phenomenon at his Williamsburg bar, Bar Madonna. From the start, he designed the menu so guests could sit down to a full dinner or simply share a few snacks. “We wanted people to come in and kind of be able to choose their experience that they're having,” he says.

Cocktails remain the main draw at this Italian-American cocktail bar, but Madonna says more guests are skipping a proper dinner in favor of hopping from bar to bar, having a drink and a snack at each stop.

That trend led Bar Madonna to introduce aperitivo hour with complimentary snacks this summer and to keep the kitchen open late every night of the week. Tables stacked with smashed meatball parm sandwiches or spreads of arancini alla vodka can be found well into the early morning, since few spots stay open late. “Solid late-night food is hard to find, even though you would think in New York that would not be the case,” he says.

Selling a $49 New York Strip after midnight with a few rounds of Negronis isn’t bad for the bottom line. But more than that, Madonna says his main goal with the late-night menu is to cater to guests—and to the industry he’s loved for years.

“There have been many times when we keep the kitchen open later because there are industry people in here eating past 1 a.m.,” he says. “It’s been awesome to see.”

29 Sep 2025