Chandlers Steakhouse

Emerging trends in fine dining can be very tricky in a number of ways. For one, simply identifying what those trends are taking place is difficult. In some cases, they can emerge, be the rage for a few months, and then disappear completely. Even more difficult, and more important by far, is accurately identifying which trends deserve to taken seriously and incorporated into a menu and which are flash-in-the-pan fads customers will lose interest in after a month. That can be particularly true for restaurateurs and their customers outside of the major metropolises. After all, the fine dining dynamic of New York City and the culture of fine dining Boise supports can be quite different. That’s not to say that Boise is underrepresented by excellent restaurants or even by culinary innovation. Just the opposite, in fact, but smaller markets aren’t as equipped to support a wide collection of high-end, niche restaurants capitalizing on a recent trend. That can make incorporating trends in ...

Bars are such a ubiquitous feature of fine dining restaurants, asking why they became and remain such an important feature of fine dining may seem moot. Additionally, the purpose of the bar may seem sufficiently obvious to make a discussion of it seem unnecessary. It’s there because people like to have alcoholic drinks during dinner, or a nightcap afterwards. While people enjoying a drink with dinner is obviously not an insignificant part of a bar’s appeal, from the downtown Boise restaurants to the most exclusive New York eateries, there’s actually a far more complex and interesting series of reasons that bars and their product enhance the dining experience. And that enhancement of the experience goes beyond serving drinks that make people feel good after drinking them, although that doesn’t hurt. The Basics Obviously, there are some basic, pragmatic reasons it’s good to have a bar in a fine restaurant. It’s good for the restaurant because bars tend to have a pretty decent marg...