Millennial Minimalist Restaurant Decor is Dead — Enter the ‘Nostalgic Tavern’
October 6, 2025 | 2 min to read
A cultural shift away from 2010s minimalism is turning restaurant interiors toward lived-in furniture, dark wood, and Grandma’s tchotchkes, rejecting pastel, millennial-pink palettes, Nordic minimalism, and carefully curated, social-media-ready spaces. Iconic spots like The Butcher’s Daughter, Dimes, Sqirl, and chains such as Sweetgreen epitomized the prior era’s smooth, off-white, photogenic aesthetic, now being supplanted by warmer, more tactile, nostalgic design.
White walls and succulents, begone — the people yearn for lived-in furniture, dark wood, and Grandma’s tchotchkes
“Once 2010s minimalism is gone, what’s the next main aesthetic?” This question was asked in a Reddit thread a year ago, and lately, its application to the world of restaurant decor has been growing in my mind.
Until very recently, the visual shorthand for a Very Cool Place to eat was easy to spot: a pastel color palette — heavy on the pale millennial pink, of course — with minimalist, Nordic midcentury modern furniture; Jean Cocteau-esque line art; ceramics in an array of dusty shades; and a sense that interiors were graphic-designed rather than lived in, inoffensively photogenic and social-media-ready. Call it the Wayfair-ification of design interiors. When they weren’t pink, walls were off-white and unembellished; everything was smooth and beige. There was the Butcher’s Daughter, which opened its first NYC location in 2012, as well as Dimes, Sqirl, and over time, many, many locations of Sweetgreen.
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