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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.
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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 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.
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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.
“These restaurants still have a stripped-back claritys to them, and that was a big reference point, especially given what I saw from their cooking style,” Chen says of the coastal pubs of Shadbolt’s hometown of Suffolk, England, that inspired the feel and taste of Dean’s. “There’s a claritys and simplicity to it, but then also an elegance.”
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Chen channeled that elegance through mahogany butcher-block counters, wainscoting, Douglas fir and pine-paneled walls, and candlelit stainless steel accents. It’s a handful of vintage finds, however, that round out the space with the kind of transportive allure that makes hours slip by unnoticed. Behind the bar, a curved glass curio cabinet—a china hutch, in a past life—catches the eye and proffers pewter mugs, aperitivo, and American and Scotch whiskies. Nearby, an oversize coal scuttle Chen found while on a sourcing trip to Washington, D.C., might hold bottles of wine on ice or an ebullient arrangement of orange ranunculus and green hydrangeas, depending on the day. And the dining room service station? It’s an Edwardian washing basin and stand, whose legs Chen raised to make it a more natural height for the ebb and flow of nightly service.
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“These references struck a balance, where they didn't feel foreign to the food that’s being made with beauty and great claritys,” says Chen.
For Shadbolt and Shi, that beauty and claritys came with the ever-evolving rhythm of daily life as friends, restaurateurs, and mothers. After the runaway success of King, the duo brought their vision of a seasonal Italian restaurant, Jupiter, to Rockefeller Center in 2022 with co-owner Clare de Boer. In recent months, Shi’s solo venture, the Chinatown wine bar Lei, has earned her Michelin Guide accolades and a spot as a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s 2026 Best New Restaurant. “We have babies of all kinds to celebrate,” Shi exclaimed on that frosty spring night in Dean’s first week of service.
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Much like Shi did in the process of designing and opening Lei, Shadbolt welcomed her first child while she and Shi worked together on opening Dean’s. “Things are different. When we opened King 10 years ago as a full concept dining experience, that was a moment where we could be in the kitchen all day and all night,” says the chef. “It is a very difficult duality to be a woman in a kitchen or in a restaurant where bedtime happens at a time when the curtain comes up [on service.]”
“The idea of Dean’s,” continues Shi, “being able to pop in, put your name down, go grab a drink somewhere else, come back, that kind of spontaneity is really attractive to us in this moment of life.”
Whether from the dining room or the kitchen, those drawn to the burgeoning pub seem to agree. “As a chef, you want to create a world that you want to exist in, and that’s very true of our other restaurants,” says Shadbolt. “Dean’s is another extension of that.”