Fancy Restaurants for Dogs Are Booming Right Now

A dog enjoys a specially curated pup menu at The Wilson in New York City.

One of San Francisco’s newest tasting menus is also its most exclusive. On Sundays only, the popular Dogue patisserie and store serves a seven-course meal featuring high end, chef-prepared small plates. The organic beef chuck steak comes raw and adorned with pretty spirals of fermented carrot and a dusting of dehydrated beet powder. For dessert, pastel cake balls and rose-shaped tarts are made with ingredients like antelope heart and ground bone. The restaurant’s main point of difference: Instead of humans, the diners in question are dogs.

“Honestly, I don’t know who gets more enjoyment, the dogs eating or me watching them eat,” says Rahmi Massarweh, the chef-owner of Dogue, which opened late September this year. The “Bone Appétit” (yes, really) tasting menu costs $75 per floofer, so of course it’s spawned a slew of hot takes on wealth inequality, capitalism, and a society in peril. But Massarweh, a dog lover and Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, just wants to see our four-legged friends thrive. “If you knew that your choices directly impacted how long a member of your family would live, wouldn’t you want to make the best choice for them?”

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Over the past century, Americans’ approach to feeding dogs has undergone a major shift. In the 1910s, a household pup would be lucky to get a dollop of canned horse meat—which was made from worn out old workhorses sent to the slaughterhouse. But today, the humanification of pet food has snowballed into fancy subscriptions and specialized diets. There’s also a proliferation of animal-friendly bars, ice cream parlors, and restaurants like Dogue that serve doughnuts, froyo, and beer made for dogs.

The beloved dog ice cream franchise Salty Paws, which first launched in Delaware four years ago, will soon have 22 locations nationwide. Even big chains like Shake Shack and Starbucks have dog snacks for people who simply won’t treat themselves to a venti caramel frappuccino without treating their best friend too. The Google search term “dog restaurants near me” has been rising steadily since 2014, and our current dog food boom has contributed to a pet food industry worth $50 billion dollars in 2021. Pet owners are now spending more than double what they did in 2010 on their favorite furballs.

“We decided to invest in the belief that pooch lovers would jump at the chance to eat, drink, and socialize in an establishment geared for pups and people alike,” says Jamie Hardaway, who opened her bar Hops & Hounds in San Antonio in May 2020. She was right: About 1,600 people—usually flanked by at least one dog each—come by every week for birthday and adoption parties, theme nights, or to hang in the off-leash play areas shaded by oak trees.

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The food at some of these dog-friendly spots looks good enough for humans to eat. Three Dog Bakery, which has 46 franchises within the States and three in Hong Kong, sells seasonal cookies, muffins, and custom birthday cakes exclusively for canines. One “Pupcake” features pink buttermilk frosting shaped into a small piglet. Another carrot cake doughnut is sweetened with honey, dipped in yogurt, and sprinkled in cinnamon. The “Chicken & Woofles” features a waffle topped with a scoop of vanilla frosting rolled in flavored biscuit crumbs and comes with a yogurt bone.

“I don’t know who gets more enjoyment, the dogs eating or me watching them eat.”

Regulars that roll up every morning to Chateau le Woof, a cafe and play area that opened seven years ago in the New York neighborhood of Astoria in Queens, can sip coffee while their pups wolf down breakfast items like poached eggs and uncured bacon with pumpkin puree or peanut butter and banana pancakes. The Wilson in New York City, which added a dog menu in 2019, will serve $24 grilled steak to your pooch. At Hops & Hounds, owners can booze at picnic tables while their dogs tuck into specials like “The Quarter Hounder” made with a ground beef patty; “Chicken Paw Pie” stuffed with tender bites of grilled chicken breast; and the house favorite—a “Puppuccino” drizzled in warm peanut butter sauce.

We’re feeding our pets like they’re tiny nobles and not butt-sniffing, stinky poop machines—because they’ve never been so important to our emotional lives. During the pandemic, dog adoption surged as stressed and anxious humans sought comfort and connection amid isolation. Dogs offer companionship and love, which is why we increasingly like to think of them as family, says Zazie Todd, PhD, an animal behavior expert and the author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy. It makes sense, then, that we want to feed our fur children foods that look palatable from a human perspective—and that spending money on them makes us happy, too.

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Pup-friendly restaurants and cafes offer an easy framework for humans to dote on their dogs. “Your dog doesn’t know that it’s specifically a beer or a birthday cake, but dogs like food so they’ll enjoy it anyway,” says Todd.

Bella Miranda, a 21-year-old brand director in Virginia Beach, VA brings Stormi, her gray-and-white husky, to a nearby Salty Paws ice cream shop twice a month as a way for them to relax and bond. “Her eyes light up as we’re approaching the door,” says Miranda, who typically orders a banana cream- or pumpkin-flavored scoop for Stormi. “I want her to feel happy and loved,” she says.

Dog-specific restaurants also ease owner anxieties, like pets munching on something that they shouldn’t be. That’s what Charlotte Minto-Sparks, a 27-year-old social media marketer, appreciated about bringing her mini dachshund Rigatoni to New York City canine cafe Boris & Horton. “He liked saying hi to all the people,” she says. But “what I enjoyed most was being in a place where I wasn’t worried about him running into the street.”

There’s plenty of Twitter discourse criticizing the rise in dog cafes and restaurants as frivolous and unnecessary—especially in this economy. “People are out here starving, work they asses off and cant get proper care with their tax payer dollars and you want to treat dogs to a meal that cost $75 and up?” one user wrote about Dogue’s opening.

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But for others, like former Queens, New York local Gillian Wach, these designed-for-dog spaces are an essential point of community. Amid the work-from-home pandemic monotony, taking her tiny chihuahua mix rescue Tiger Blaze to the Chateau every morning was a bright spot in the day. “I was actually meeting people in my community for the first time,” says the 34-year-old art director. When Tiger’s second birthday rolled around, the venue choice was a no-brainer. They celebrated with a salmon-flavored ice cream cake and other local pups.

“People become friends here,” says Chateau le Woof owner Natassa Contini. “The experience is as much for them as it is for the dog.”