At first, customers didn’t know what to expect at Potential New Boyfriend in Asheville, North Carolina. During the day, the space glows with a riot of pop art and sunlight shining on a mishmash of couches and midcentury chairs. Visits kick off with amuse-bouches, yet the wine list, plotted on a New York magazine-style matrix of flavors, skews casual. The food menu, dreamed up by owner Disco and chef Dana Amromin, mostly consists of desserts, like earthy tahini cheesecake or masala chai ice cream sundaes, but the bar only serves customers at least 21 years old. At night, guest DJs spin a variety of tunes through high-end speakers; people sometimes approach the booth thinking they need to order at the counter.

“Guests don’t necessarily know what to expect, which has its pros and cons,” Disco says. “We get to wow them.” Customers aren’t the only ones who have struggled to parse Potential New Boyfriend. “Institutions don’t really know what to do with us and how to categorize us, whether it’s the liquor authority in North Carolina or insurance companies. That has been tricky,” he adds.

After running a small ice cream startup at a farmer’s market, Disco decided he didn’t want to open a scoop shop. Instead, he threw together all the things he did want — frozen desserts, a casual wine bar, small plates, a living room-like space he could hang out in for hours — into one place. “I wanted to piece together the best of all worlds,” he says. “The experience I want to offer is as if customers came to a friend’s living room for a dinner party.”

Over the last year, locals have learned to enjoy the untraditional setup. As one of the first new businesses to open after Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville in September, 2024, Potential New Boyfriend quickly cemented itself as a staple of the community.

This sort of multidimensional venue isn’t anything new. All-day cafes and gastropubs have blurred the lines between restaurant, bar, and cafe for years. But in 2025, five years after the COVID pandemic destabilized the restaurant industry, not-quite-restaurants are everywhere — and they’re really good, turning out food that rivals the best sit-down restaurants in contexts that surprise and, yes, wow diners.

For months, the Eater team has crisscrossed the country to compile our 2025 Best New Restaurants list — which publishes next week, so watch this space. As in past years, this process included plenty of debate within the team about which restaurants feel most significant and which chefs most deserve attention right now. But faced with impressive food at places like Potential New Boyfriend that defy easy definition, the team returned to the Big Question asked in countless think pieces over the years: What makes a restaurant a restaurant, anyway?

“We really saw a need for a space that served more roles than a traditional cocktail bar or a traditional restaurant or a traditional coffee shop,” says Bryce Summers, a partner at Cuties, an all-day bar in Portland, Maine, that’s open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. “There’s tons of really phenomenal, exceptional options for all of those things in the Old Port and Portland as a whole, but there was really lacking a space that kind of bridged the gap between them.”

The bar serves cocktails alongside cortados during the day, while the food menu transitions from egg and cheese “McGriddles” for lunch to “snacks for dinner” like coconut shrimp toast crab chips. The space — floor-to-ceiling windows that let in lots of daylight, a neon sign on the backbar that flickers on to announce the evening — slides fluidly from morning to night. Cuties attracts customers who might be seeking a cafe, bar, or restaurant, tripling its customer base, and it can attract the same customers back for all three services. “It gives us a lot of opportunity to offer lots of different things. Your net gets cast a lot wider,” Summers says.

That’s true for Evelyn Garcia and Henry Lu of Third Place in Houston too. The Top Chef alumni, who together run Latin-Southeast Asian restaurant Jūn, opened Third Place — an unmistakable industry buzzword — as a cafe, serving coffee drinks and pastries, to monetize the restaurant space during the day. The duo wanted to expand their reach by bringing in customers who might otherwise be intimidated by a sit-down meal at Jūn.

“We’re moving away from just being a special occasion destination and more embedded into our neighborhood,” Lu says.

The cafe is just the start, anchoring a much larger project that has broad appeal for a range of customers. A chef residency program brings in rotating pop-ups, local artisans (pottery makers, florists, jewelry makers) hold workshops in the space, and a craft table allows remote workers to burn off some creative steam throughout the workday. “So many new coffee shops turn into a cafe-slash-bar now,” Lu says. “You’re trying to tap into a lot of different markets because rent’s not getting any cheaper. Everyone is just thinking outside of the box to try to keep their dreams alive.”

For the Cuties team, the tricky economic waters were slightly different. After Bon Appétit named Portland its Restaurant City of the Year in 2018 and a post-COVID boom filled the city with competitors, Summers says, “all-day bar” was an open lane in an overheated market. It’s not a revolutionary concept but it’s new for Portland. “It’s an ambitious undertaking in terms of scope, but it sets us apart in a big way,” Summers says.

These venues fulfill more than just the desire for good meals. “I want to bring in the things that I’m personally looking for, to feel more creative outside of food and outside of my workplace,” Garcia says. “I want art shows. I want pottery. I want flowers. I want things that people can come and enjoy.”

“We created a space that we always wanted, that we would’ve loved to see out there in the world,” Lu adds. “So the phrase ‘third place’ just made a lot of sense.”

“Third place” generally describes a casual space for socializing that isn’t home or work. The term gained traction as an antidote to social isolation brought on by the COVID pandemic, though some, like former Eater correspondent Jaya Saxena, argue the term has become overused and ambiguous as operators and commentators apply it to spaces that look nothing alike. Critics suggest that third places should be free for visitors to enjoy; by that definition all restaurants and bars would fail. Yet its broader definition reflects the mission of the Cuties team to fill a void in the Old Port and the community vibe encapsulated at Potential New Boyfriend.

It’s also the driving force at the Wren, a new bar and lounge in Baltimore, which owners Will Mester, Millie Powell, and Rosemary Liss modeled after Irish and British pubs, where the focus is more on socializing than dining.

“We really just wanted it to be quite a straightforward gastropub,” Mester says. “In a perfect world, I would be fine with just a bar because it’s a much more flexible arrangement. I like the idea of maybe cooking a couple things a couple days a week and having the Wren mostly function for drinks. But it’s not possible to do with the mortgage. And nobody would show up.”

Using two induction hobs and a convection oven in a corner of the bar, Mester prepares thoughtful renditions of lamb mince, toasties, or a terrine with brown bread. The team never intended for the Wren to be a full restaurant, but the New York Times and Bon Appétit named it to their 2025 best new restaurants lists, which has changed the casual, social atmosphere. The space has had to change too; initially the team planned to cut the space in half, using the front bar for dining and the back lounge, designed with low tables and stools, just for drinks. Customers had other ideas.

“Americans don’t like rules,” Mester says, so now the team serves food in both rooms. Cooking in the corner of the bar also becomes more challenging when a line of customers out the door has read about dishes in national publications. “It was fine, really, until we’ve been remarkably busy,” Mester says. “That’s kind of tested the limits of what we can do back there. So to some degree we’ve also had to construct the menu to accommodate that.”

Mester is frank about this evolution. “You have to turn it over to the public at some point, see what it does, and then see how you can succeed with it,” he says.

In similar ways, the teams at Cuties, Potential New Boyfriend, and Third Place have all had to negotiate their spaces and offerings with their customers. “I thought that the hi-fi listening aspect would be really a big focus and I still want it to be,” Disco says. “But — and you can see it in likes on Instagram posts — the thing that draws people in is the desserts by far. So we have to adjust. It’s great what we want to offer, but it’s up to people who come in to tell us what they want, and we’re adjusting to that.”

This is true of all restaurants: Chefs and owners have to respond to their local markets. It should come as no surprise that they have to play to trends (Garcia and Lu serve a lot of matcha; the Dubai chocolate sundae at Potential New Boyfriend has proven popular) and shift menus based on what’s selling (a well-executed aguachile came off the Cuties menu, while lunch now includes more sandwiches). Still, the relaxed, unstructured, community-focused format of these venues makes them especially responsive to customers and moldable to their shifting wants and needs.

At the same time, owners can’t always let customers completely take over their spaces that seem to invite free use. “At the end of the day, we need to turn tables, and that is challenging,” Disco says. “I’ve been debating how to navigate, you know, two gal pals that have a glass of wine and sit for two hours. How do you handle that on a Friday night when there’s like a line out the door? We do live in a capitalist society, and we do need to kind of find the balance.”

There’s a learning curve on both sides. Customers learn what to expect — rotating lunch specials from pop-up chefs at Third Place, seated service at Potential New Boyfriend despite the relaxed space — while operators learn how to meet audiences where they are. Together, the two sides can reach something perfectly attuned to the moment.

“This restaurant isn’t just a restaurant anymore,” Lu says. “People aren’t just coming for the food that we’re creating, but the lifestyle that we’re creating for the community. Everything is a vibe now.”