Is Millennial Pink Getting Out of Hand in NYC Dining?

The color au courant in music, design, and fashion is pink, and it has bled into the current food and dining world. The very pink-colored wine rosé, for example, has been on the upswing for several years now — so much so that this weekend, an all-pink rosé-themed party on a yacht with sorority girl-crafted name “La Nuit en Rosé” is entering its fourth year.

Early bird tickets at $175 and $185 are already sold out. A teaser video is naturally shot at sunset, when the sky is also sort of pink, and the demand for pink-everything is so high that the organizers are also entering their second year of a separate festival called “pinknic,” a pink-toned “rosé picnic and music festival” on Governor’s Island.

La Nuit en Rosé and its team are not the only ones to capitalize on the Instagram-friendly color of the moment. Last summer, New York’s love for frozen beverages and the color pink combined with an aggressive rise in frosé — a trend that doesn’t seem likely to abate this year.

There are also not one, not two, but three restaurants that are entirely pink in New York right now that have opened in the past year. Italian restaurant Pietro Nolita’s walls, chairs, tables, and even some of its food is pink. Bushwick/East Williamsburg cafe Carthage Must Be Destroyed spreads its avocado toast on pink plates and seats its patrons on pink stools. Its walls, too, are pink, at least in all the places that they aren’t exposed brick. And in this spring, a tiny new Vietnamese restaurant Bep Ga opened in Chinatown with both a pink storefront and pink interior walls. “#pinkvibes,” the restaurant hashtags its Instagram posts.

Even restaurants not emboldened to fully bathe their spaces in the trendiest color on the internet are at least dipping their toes. Here’s a brief list:

— The front doors and planters at Sel Rrose are pink, a fact that the savviest of Instagrammers will take advantage of by arriving in pink clothes. See this and this. The restaurant opened back in 2013.

— Cafe Henrie, a fashiony cafe that opened in 2015, has a pink sign, pink tables, and pink menus.

— In January 2016, trendy LES Thai restaurant The Lucky Bee opened with tons and tons of pink accents — menus, tables, signs, walls, and more. Neon pink flamingos are also rampant.

— The pace picked up in 2017. Another fashiony cafe, De Maria, opened earlier this year and has pink plates that are generously displayed on their Instagram

— Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s newest restaurant abcV, opened in February, has its share of pink dishware.

— At Major Food Group’s newly opened revamp of the Four Seasons, The Grill, the kitchen displays stacks of pink Le Creuset cast-iron pots.

— Chef Gerardo Gonzalez’s Chinatown restaurant Lalito (formerly Lalo) first opened in fall 2016, but starting this weekend, he’s having pink food specials inspired by Mexican architect Luis Barragán as part of a design week with magazine Sight Unseen. Here is pink ceviche:

— And the yet-to-open restaurant Harvey in the Williamsburg Hotel also has pops of pink, on trays, on the menus, and on their logo.

Are we done yet? How much more pink can the market handle? And can you hear yourself think if everyone around you is wearing this many shades of pink?

Pantone predicts that the next color to make waves will be green. But with so many restaurants going pink to attract the fashion crowds and Instagram, it’s possible we are just on the cusp of pink mania.