Hold the Tablecloth.(International Edition; LUXURY)(dining)

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

Top chefs are serving it up simple--and cheap. In this economy, it's all about the food.

It's Friday night in London's trendy Shoreditch neighborhood, and the Albion is humming. East End hipsters, bankers and friends out for a night of gossiping sit elbow to elbow at long, wooden communal tables. Both the menu and the ambience are simple--you may have to ask the patron next to you for your cutlery--and even the wait staff is dressed down. Albion, which opened in January, doesn't take bookings, and there is no fawning service here. But the food is excellent: big portions of old favorites like fish and chips and mushy peas, sold at very reasonable prices. Peter Prescott, who co-owns Albion along with restaurant and design guru Sir Terence Conran and his wife, says people are drawn to the straightforward concept. "We've had executives from a renowned blue-chip company who came in wanting to entertain clients and show them that instead of holding a big extravagant dinner in a five-star restaurant, you can entertain in these times in a very simple, enjoyable way," he says. "We've had captains of industry in here, jackets off, tucking into food and I think they probably enjoyed it more than they would have in a really tight-ass restaurant."

Those kinds of places are definitely passe. People may be down, but they're still dining out, increasingly drawn to eateries that offer delicious, hearty food in a laid-back environment. It sounds like an oxymoron, but bare-bones fine dining is the order of the day. Forget suiting up and sitting for hours through a four-course meal, whose heart-stopping bill reflects the stilted service as much as the food; today's diners want to strip away the excess and pay only for what they came for: first-rate food. Thanks in part to the onslaught of celebrity-chef shows and cookbooks that allow anyone to become a gourmand, customers have gotten savvy about the restaurant industry; they are no longer impressed by the bells and whistles--amuse-bouches, armies of servers, water menus--that typically define fine dining. Restaurants like Warsaw's U Kucharzy, Paris's Le Timbre and New York's 26 Seats offer basic surroundings--no linens or rare-bred roses in sight--that emphasize the experience of the palate over the atmospherics. "In a sense, consumers are no longer bothered by whether there is a tablecloth or not, and sometimes lots of frills almost make you suspicious that the food is not going to be so great," says Jon Lake, who covers the restaurant sector for Deloitte. "These days, great-quality, well-produced, well-served food at a reasonable price is what it is all about."

In Europe at least, the concept of no-frills restaurants grew partly out of the gastropub revolution that hit Britain in the mid-1990s, when diners embraced upscale cuisine served in the relaxed environs of a scrubbed-up pub. Though gastropub menus varied--some served more traditional pub fare like sausages and mash, while others offered upscale options like chicken-liver parfait with vanilla jelly--the idea that people could enjoy delicious food in low-key surroundings took off. It helps that dining has moved from being a discretionary to an essential part of people's lifestyles, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report. During the last recession in the 1990s, one in five Britons ate out regularly; by 2008, that number had tripled.

A Zagat survey recently found that in the United States, 50 percent of all meals are eaten outside the home. That prompted the company to dub the good-food/no-frills phenomenon "BATH"--Better Alternative to Home. "These restaurants are competing with your ability to shop, cook and clean," says Zagat Survey's cofounder Tim Zagat. "They buy their food wholesale and they produce it efficiently, while we buy our food retail and produce it ...