Is Dean’s a Pub? Does It Matter?

Ever since I was a little boy, a question has been gnawing at me, eating me up. “What is a pub?” I asked my mother on a cold winter’s eve, Chicago, sometime in the ’90s. “Shut up and eat your gruel,” she said. I ask nearly every British person I meet, and I never get a straight answer. Everyone has a long-winded response that veers into the philosophical. I often leave more confused than when I started. As far as I’ve gathered, a pub is a place where you drink Guinness, first and foremost, or just a “pint.” A pub is a bar, but not all bars are pubs. There’s food generally, and you wouldn’t really drink a cocktail at a pub, I think. More than anything it seems that a pub is a vibe, a pub is a state of mind, a pub is a safe space. You know a pub when you see one.

There’s no cuisine more exotic to a New Yorker than British cuisine. This is the final frontier, our colonial full-circle moment. New York City’s British homecoming has been a long time coming, 250 years to be exact. In New York we have Mexican goat tacos, Korean goat barbecue, Indian goat testicle curry, but a proper plate of mushy peas is hard to come by. A Salt and Battery is alive and well despite rumors to the contrary, and of course there’s Lord’s and there’s Dame, and now there’s Dean’s, by Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi, of King and Jupiter fame. (Annie is on quite the tear and recently opened Lei, one of my favorite wine bars in New York.)

The worst thing about Dean’s is the fact that it sits at the edge of the hellscape that is known as the West Village. A walk to Dean’s on a beautiful day might involve walking through gaggles of finance/marketing NPCs waiting hours in line for a slice of pizza or yelling shrilly into their phones while sipping a negroni. But sometimes a treacherous journey makes the destination that much sweeter, and I’d say this is the case for Dean’s. Dean’s sits on Sixth Avenue next door to King, and like its sibling, Dean’s is a beautiful and well-proportioned room. I feel like an old man saying that I found it to be a little too loud and a little too dark, but the scale feels warm and human. As soon as you walk into Dean’s you feel safe from the West Village horde (just kidding, we love our West Village NPCs), you feel transported, maybe not to England, but to a place less complicated, with fewer choices and less Campari.

Is Dean’s a pub? Their excellent wine list may or may not disqualify them. Do pubs have somms? I don’t know if they’d admit it, and I’m sorry to blow up their spot, but more than a pub, Dean’s is lowkey a wine bar in disguise. They certainly pour a proper pint of Guinness, and if you drink 500 you get a little pewter plaque with your name on it (at $11 per pint, that little plaque will cost you $5,500 plus tax and tip), but they are serious about wine, and I’d recommend drinking some with your food. Little Scotch eggs, some Guinness bread with marmite butter, and pork cracklings are great snacks paired with any beverage, they’re fatty and salty to the perfect degree. But the plate of cold roast beef with Montgomery cheddar really sings with a glass of wine. I love this ploughman’s-inspired plate of food. It’s crazy to describe roast beef as refreshing, but served cold with horseradish cream and a crazy pickled black walnut, it’s lifted and bright, and that Montgomery cheddar tastes like grass and soil. You know exactly what that cow was eating, you can imagine the beautiful pasture that it was grazing in, you can taste the sun. This is the definition of terroir.

Fish and chips are not easy. It’s such a simple dish, but so many things can go wrong. Soggy, greasy, bad fish, flaccid chips—the list goes on. Dean’s does it right. Well-fried, crisp, substantial batter but not too substantial, and fresh flaky hake, with really nice rustic, potatoey chip-shop fries. I thought I might want some ketchup or mustard, but eaten with a splash of vinegar and some sweet mushy peas, it’s perfect. I would love to have had one more piece of fish (an order is one piece of fish and fries), but I would not have had room to eat all of the other delicious food, and leftover fish and chips are tragic. A lemon and elderflower posset for dessert was bright, refreshing, and one of the best-textured custards I’ve ever had. And their whipped cream and chocolate crémeux-stuffed brandy snaps were a delightful end to the meal. They’d pair so well with a pint of Guinness and a 30-minute walk home.

Returning to the question: is Dean’s a pub? Honestly, who cares? I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you that Dean’s is a restaurant, and it’s a good restaurant. It’s early, but it could even be a great restaurant. Dean’s is of course inspired by pubs, but ultimately Dean’s just wants to be Dean’s. I look forward to seeing how it evolves with the seasons, and how they embrace New York City, and how New York City embraces them. Their culture is not a costume.