Why is every new restaurant a ‘tavern’?

They’re back again, the taverns. Not in the drinkable-museum sense — though you can still visit Fraunces Tavern, the 18th-century inn where George Washington celebrated the routing of the British, which has been in near-continuous business ever since — but the living, breathing, beer-breathed one. In the past few months, here come Trudie’s Tavern in Carroll Gardens and Grimm Tavern in the old Olmsted space, even a self-styled “Argentine tavern” in Graciela. Why the onrush?

A healthy republic suds itself at taverns. In colonial Massachusetts, the General Court levied fines on any town that did not operate one. America as such was born in them, where the future of the colonies was debated: Taverns, one English satirist correctly observed in the 18th Century, are “the nurseries of profaneness and treason.” Alternatively, 250 years ago, Samuel Johnson aphorized mistily that “there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.” Does his pronouncement still hold? Was it merely inevitable that the taverns would follow the wave of wine bars that crashed, in greater or lesser Parisian style, onto our shores? Or is it that the tavern represents a retreat and a retrenchment, a defusion of restaurant fuss?

What the tavern telegraphs isn’t gourmet or cosmopolitan. Even the word is shorthand for a kind of hard-worn simplicity (elsewhere in the early republic, a tavern was known as an “ordinary”). Twenty years ago, any tavern worth its duck fat gussied itself up under the imported mantle of gastropub. Our new taverns hide their sophistication under a bushel. You know what you’re going to get, or so you think.

The rough-and-tumble taverners of olde would have been surprised to enter Trudie’s on a sticky early Thursday evening recently and stumble directly onto a family of four with their dueling soothes: two kids under 10 plugged into their iPads, two parents plugged into their cocktails. Lusty darkness has no purchase here. A tavern, Nate Adler, one of Trudie’s proprietors, told me in his soft-shouldered, family-friendly dining room, is “someplace that brings the neighborhood together.”

Turns out the appetites of the tavern regular and the after-schooler may not be as disparate as all that. Trudie’s balloon-size hot pretzel, which comes to the table with honey mustard and salted butter, pleased both the adults and the 15-year-old at mine. Trudie’s roast chicken — another tavern staple — is brined and burnished, its inclusion on the menu inspired by the Zabar’s rotisserie chickens of Adler’s Upper West Side childhood. The Zabar’s mention should be enough to flag the Jewish American influence. There’s “One Big Potato Pancake” to start (not really all that big, honor compels me to report, though nicely sprinkled with smoked trout and tobiko); egg noodles; and, with the chicken, Adler’s German Jewish grandmother’s cucumber-and-sour-cream salad. There are plenty of drinks to be downed alongside, including the house’s own custom-brewed beer: A tavern demands as much. But maybe it’s a measure of our leaner peptide present that Trudie’s savory, schmaltz-dotted martinis can be ordered, as is increasingly an option, in regular or half-sizes.

If Trudie’s, with a sleeping infant in the dining room and no nuts for the allergen-averse in the carrot cake, is a tavern for the family, Lonnies, the new Boerum Hill spot from Sean Rembold and Caron Callahan of Brooklyn Heights’s Ingas Bar and a tavern in all but name, is one for date night. It has a dressier, more modish affect with slabs of pink marble, framed Nan Goldin posters, and a soundtrack heavy on early-aughts indie, but the food is close as kin. The locally famous Ingas burger is ported over basically unchanged, though it’s joined here by a brick chicken with garlicky chermoula. While much else on the menu reaches toward the gourmet, the two bars in one space leave little doubt that the tavern mind-set prevails. The bartender, pouring out multi-gin house martinis, mentioned that plans are already in place to expand in the coming months to the currently unattached bar next door.

Capitaine, a “seafood tavern, of sorts,” is a tavern retrofitted: It takes over the space that was Libertine, Cody Pruitt’s far-West Village bistro. I liked Libertine’s scruffy Gallicism well enough, but I found its prices punishing, and Capitaine suggests I wasn’t the only one. Pruitt and partner Jacob Cohen have rejiggered the focus from the kitchen to the bar and the land to the sea. While not cheap, the prices have come down some, and the seafood focus (fruits de mer towers start at $65) makes it easier to nibble piecewise. New executive chef Mike Gutterman, who helped open nearby seafood-heavy Crevette, is now in the kitchen. What is a seafood tavern, of sorts? Not one that can dispense with either a cheeseburger or steak-frites, though the usual roast chicken has been swapped out for a flat-grilled dorade with a punchy bird’s-eye-chile aïoli. The house lobster roll is taken from the fish shack to somewhere more urbane, the usual mayo replaced by a light and welcome dressing of lobster-infused brown-butter hollandaise.

On a Sunday night, the bar was buzzier than the dining room. This, more than anything else, gave Capitaine its tavern airs. For all the good old gruffness promised by the tavern branding, a contemporary clean dominates. When the next revolution is plotted, it won’t be over Capitaine’s salt-flecked slices of black-and-white ice-cream cake. In a few weeks of tavern-going, I found what I most missed was the ripe, filthy possibility of profanity or treason. Is it wrong to wish for worse?