On a recent spring day in the West Village of Manhattan, as employees balancing trays of tagliatelle and Gran Classico spritzes darted from the Via Carota kitchen to the sidewalk seats, one laborer seemed to be working harder than any other: the chore coat.
The utility jacket, in shades of tawny brown and cream, clung to the shoulders of the runners hauling pasta and cocktails, of the bartenders pouring out jiggers of Aperol, and of the servers unfurling menus. Each coat was cropped, slightly rumpled and projected an important message: This is a seriously stylish — but not serious — restaurant.
Via Carota may have been one of just a handful of restaurants to feature such a fashion-inflected look when Rita Sodi and Jody Williams opened it in 2014. But today, the humble coat has become the de facto uniform for restaurants of a certain ilk.
You won’t see it on a McDonald’s cashier or the maître d’ at Le Bernardin. You will see it at “a casual restaurant that has all the foods and wines you could get at a two-star Michelin restaurant, without any of the fuss,” said Arjav Ezekiel — an owner of the restaurant Birdie’s in Austin, Texas.
Over the last decade, as work wear made its way into street fashion and cultural fascination with the hospitality industry has reached a sweaty, flushed-cheek fervor, restaurateurs across the country have adopted the style in lieu of the stuffier sport coats, vests and aprons of yore.
“The chore coat is saying to the diner, ‘We’ve considered what we’re wearing, and style is important, but this is also a place where we’re not so buttoned up that you can’t have a few martinis and make it a fun night,’” said Brooks Reitz, who put the staff of Melfi’s, his restaurant in Charleston, S.C., in chore coats when it opened in 2018.
There is no uniform at Birdie’s, but you’re sure to spot a chore coat on Mr. Ezekiel, who has a collection of 15 different versions that he cycles through every night of service, and that often creep into his weekend wardrobe. At Claud, in the East Village of Manhattan, you’ll see one on the co-owner Chase Sinzer, who refers to them as his “chores,” and who also has a white chore suit from Wythe New York that he reserves for off-hours only.
At Lodi, in Rockefeller Center, a chore coat designed by Lady and Butler is the official uniform. Ahead of the December opening of Traveling Mercies in Aurora, Colo., the co-owner Caroline Glover ordered nearly 70 vintage chore coats in the famous French Bleu de Travail style for not only servers, but also any customers who might want to join the proverbial union.
“It reflects the entire environment surrounding dining changing over the last 15 to 20 years,” said Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who founded the fashion label Bode, which supplied cotton herringbone chore coats to Dr. Clark in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “Restaurants offer a more casual atmosphere for dining out more regularly than Americans used to go out.”
Before it broadcast a fluency in cloudy, sulfite-free wines, the chore coat clothed manual laborers of 19th-century Europe.
There are plenty of functional reasons the coat is perfect for today’s servers. For one, it has large pockets. Tim Furtado, a sommelier at Lord’s in Greenwich Village, uses them to hold his wine key and squirrel away entire bottles between trips to the cellar. It’s not a hoodie, nor is it a $6,000 Tom Ford tuxedo jacket — it’s an in-between layer that transmits “a certain sensibility and an intentionality,” Mr. Ezekiel said.
The chore coat is often made from fabric that forgives or hides a stain, and it needn’t be replaced or laundered as frequently as a blazer. For many who cut their teeth in fine dining, that alone makes it a favorable alternative to a suit.
When the creative director Somsack Sikhounmuong joined the fashion label Alex Mill in 2018, he incorporated a single style of the chore coat into his first collection. It sold out almost immediately. Classic work-wear brands like Carhartt began peddling their versions of a chore coat to Americans as early as 1917, and Le Mont St Michel, with headquarters closer to the jacket’s roots, has been churning out versions for ages. But for some, the wave of fresher silhouettes hitting the market is a revelation.
Greg Ryan, who grew up on a farm and worked the land in a chore coat, reconnected with the style as he opened Bell’s in Los Alamos, Calif. “I looked at this coat I had known my whole life, and saw a modern silhouette,” he said. “And then you just get into it — you start to spend half your time on Etsy looking up ‘vintage French chore coat’ over and over,” he added.
When Tilit, a company that makes clothing geared to hospitality workers, released a seasonal indigo collection in February, the chore coat was the first item to sell out. One chef was so desperate for a coat that the co-owner Alex McCrery gave her his personal allotment.
There’s no shortage of chore-coat mania among the 9-to-5ers, either. “I joked with my partner recently: ‘If I die, bury me in my chore coat,’” said Taylor Powers, a talent agent who lives in Brooklyn and shares custody of three chore coats with her partner. Ms. Powers uses the pockets in lieu of a purse.
Does its current ubiquity stem from a cultural fixation with “The Bear,” the printer ink hardly dry on Jeremy Allen White’s underwear ads? Maybe, chef. Or perhaps the restaurant industry is merely catching up to the Carhartt-ification of Bushwick and the spate of work-from-homers getting dressed to go nowhere.
“I do think that there are a lot of people who are very curious or enamored with restaurant culture right now,” Ms. Glover said. Having restaurant merch, or even chore coats, available to those consumers creates “an element of feeling like you’re part of the inner circle of the hospitality world.”
And just as a sommelier in a chore coat signals a specific stylishness to diners, an average person sporting a chore coat telegraphs an aesthetic sensibility and culinary know-how right back, Mr. Reitz said. “In America, when I see a guy wearing a chore coat, and he’s in a dad hat from Cervo’s, I’m like, ‘I can make some assumptions about what’s in his fridge.’ He’s going to have tinned fish.”
Restaurants mirror the trends gripping the world outside them, Mr. Sinzer said. “Restaurants absorb what people are wearing, then have a symbiotic relationship. They’re the cultural centers — places that act as a way to see what people are wearing.”
