The Rise of the Gastrotavern

At Inga’s Bar and several other recently opened places, New York’s oldest style of restaurant gets new life.

- Photography by Richard Tuschman

I’m tired of food stuff,” says Sean Rembold. “I’m tired of it just being about food or about someone’s name.” Hardly the sentiment you’d expect from a New York chef who recently opened his first restaurant after decades spent working his way up the culinary ladder, culminating in an 11-year stint running the locavore kitchens at Williamsburg’s Diner, Marlow & Sons, and Reynard. He left that post in 2017, fed up with the volume-crazed restaurant-group grind. But on a family trip to the coast of Ireland, he found fresh inspiration over potted prawns and raw oysters at a local landmark called Nancy’s, a quintessential pub where the food—“So simple, so good,” Rembold says—mattered less to him than the neighborly spirit and true sense of community.

“I was like,