2004, the Year That Changed How We Dine

If you want a sense of how far back New Yorkers have been obsessed with food, you can Google Delmonico’s. But to trace the way New Yorkers eat right now back to a specific watershed moment, you need to look back only a decade, to 2004.

A glance at the list of restaurants celebrating their 10th anniversaries in 2014 makes it clear that 2004, like the years 1967 and 1991 in music, or 1939 and 1999 in film, was a game-changer for the city’s restaurant scene. It was the year when two of the most expensive and exquisite tasting-menu temples in the city, Per Se and Masa, opened their gilded doors on the fourth floor of a shopping mall. It was the year when a young chef named David Chang debuted a place called Momofuku Noodle Bar and gradually (after some false starts) began wowing the throngs with bowls of ramen and slabs of pork belly on fluffy steamed buns.

Shall we go on? In 2004, the chef April Bloomfield and the music-business refugee Ken Friedman introduced New York to its first British-style gastropub, the Spotted Pig. Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Taavo Somer infused the meatpacking district and the Lower East Side, respectively, with youthful energy by opening Spice Market and Freemans. Integrity-and-ingredient-driven spots like Franny’s and Frankies 457 Court Street Spuntino promulgated the then-quirky notion that it was worth making the hegira all the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn to eat excellent food.

Dan Barber, meanwhile, was luring hungry New Yorkers into a different reverse commute. Suddenly it was not unreasonable to travel all the way up to Westchester County to experience hyper-local, farm-to-table gastronomy at its most fastidious in the warrens of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Oh, and Danny Meyer, the restaurateur behind Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, made the crazy decision to open a burger stand.

Before long, of course, Shake Shack would evolve into a growing national chain — and a paragon of the trend toward elevated fast food. Momofuku would turn into an international brand and Mr. Chang an empire-building star. Brooklyn’s restaurants would boom beyond anyone’s expectations, and the Spotted Pig would become “an archetype for a thousand imitations thereafter,” said Ben Leventhal, one of the founders of Eater, a food-obsessed website that he would help start a few months later, in 2005.