Beauty & Essex

Is Beauty & Essex worth booking for brunch or a special occasion?

Yes, with conditions. It has appeared on Opinionated About Dining's Leading Restaurants in North America list in both 2024 (#555) and 2025 (#572), which puts it in credible company. For a special-occasion brunch or dinner where atmosphere counts as much as the food, it delivers. If you want quiet, intimate, or purely culinary, book elsewhere.

The Space

The room is the first reason people book. The entrance through a working pawn shop is a deliberate theatrical choice, it sets the tone: Beauty & Essex is a venue that takes its own production design seriously. Inside, the main dining room runs large and layered, with low lighting, plush seating, enough visual texture to make the setting feel like an occasion in itself. There is also a bar level, the spatial separation between zones means the energy shifts depending on where you sit. For a date or a celebration dinner, request a booth in the main room. For a more social, stand-and-drink entry point, the bar works on its own terms.

The women's restroom is one of the more discussed details in guest reviews: it includes a complimentary champagne bar. That is not a rumor; it is a standing feature that recurs across verified guest accounts and has become part of what makes the venue feel like a special-occasion destination rather than just another New American restaurant on the Lower East Side.

The Food and Brunch Format

Beauty & Essex runs under chef Chris Santos and serves New American with a shareable, globally inflected format. The menu is designed for the table to order broadly rather than individually, which works in groups of three or more and is less satisfying for solo diners. Brunch and weekend service are where the venue arguably performs leading for the special-occasion reader: the combination of a visually theatrical room, approachable sharing plates, cocktail programming makes it a stronger brunch booking than many comparably priced New American options in Manhattan. For more produce-driven, quieter brunch alternatives in the city, ABC Kitchen or Craft serve a different register entirely.

No specific menu items or current prices are confirmed in our data, so we won't invent them. What the OAD rankings and Google volume together confirm is a venue with consistent above-average execution across a large guest base, not a small-room passion project with an occasional off night.

Booking and Logistics

How It Compares

Beauty & Essex sits in a different tier from the city's tasting-menu heavyweights. Le Bernardin, Atomix, Per Se, Masa, and Eleven Madison Park are all $$$$ tasting-menu or omakase commitments where the food is the point. Beauty & Essex is closer to a high-production brasserie: the room is the co-star, the format is flexible, the booking is easy. If you are choosing between them for a special occasion where the meal itself needs to be the memory, the tasting-menu venues win on culinary precision. If you want a celebration that feels festive rather than formal, Beauty & Essex is the more practical choice.

Within the New American sharing-plate category in New York, The Dutch offers a similar approachable-but-considered format with a slightly quieter room, Clocktower delivers more architectural drama with a different price positioning. The Four Horsemen is the better call if natural wine and a lower-key atmosphere matter more than spectacle. Beauty & Essex is the right choice when the group wants energy, a strong room, a format that doesn't require everyone to agree on a single tasting menu.

For comparable New American experiences in other cities, Smyth in Chicago, Providence in Los Angeles, and Lazy Bear in San Francisco each represent the format at different price points and ambition levels. Bayona in New Orleans and The Inn at Little Washington offer the special-occasion register with more formal service. Beauty & Essex is the version of that experience that works for a group who wants to feel like they're in a New York restaurant, not a dining room.

Pearl Picks Nearby

• ABC Kitchen, produce-forward New American, quieter room
• Craft, Tom Colicchio's New American, ingredient-driven
• The Dutch, similar format, slightly lower energy
• Clocktower, for a more architectural special-occasion setting
• The Four Horsemen, if wine list depth matters more than room scale

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