Jess shadbolt and annie shi's new soho pub dean's charms with vintage decor and spontaneous dining

When chef Jess Shadbolt and beverage director Annie Shi opened King in 2016, they rewrote the playbook for upscale dining downtown. Its ephemeral, hyperseasonal menu, along with a wine list that punched above its weight with hard-to-get bottles from sought-after estates, drew an endless stream of dinner guests to its light-filled dining room at the corner of King Street and 6th Avenue.

Nearly a decade later, Shadbolt and Shi's read on how to make sitting down to a coursed dinner feel like an easy exhale has continued to draw New Yorkers to that same cobblestoned street corner. And with Dean's, their snug new pub next door to King in SoHo, that tradition lives on.

Cozy ambiance and seasonal flavors

On one of the city's final frigid nights, every one of Dean's 38 seats was full as guests packed around its candlelit tables and filled the scant standing room at its mahogany and pine bar. It was only their eighth night open to the public.

Snaps of its Stargazy Pie—a savory Cornish seafood pastry studded with potatoes, butter, and a baked mackerel head—had already dotted the Instagrams of Dean's first few dinner guests, yet the dining room that night largely overlooked their phones, in favor of hours of engrossing conversation and good old-fashioned flirting.

It's one thing to build a menu and wine list that makes it as easy to say yes to one more sip and nibble as Shadbolt and Shi do: why not try a glass of the Artelium Curator's Cuvée from Sussex, the sparkling blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier that drinks like Champagne and goes as well with the bacon and malt vinegar scallops as it does with the lemon and elderflower posset.

But when it came to creating the atmosphere that makes a table of two do a double-take when they realize four hours have passed? For that, they reached out to one of the art and fashion world's favorite interior designers: Billy Cotton.

Cotton's eponymous studio was behind one of last year's toughest reservations to get downtown: chef Sam Lawrence's coolly glamorous hit, Bridges. Cotton, in turn, pointed them to 26-year-old Jason Chen, who led the initial concept design for Bridges and has since stepped out with his own studio.