My wife and I arrive at the new resto-lounge and find the hostess busy on her cellphone. It’s half past nine and we’re hungry. We stand for a while, admiring the glamorous room, then we take off our coats. Still chatting away, not looking at us, the hostess holds out an arm for them, wedges the phone between shoulder and ear and reaches for menus with her free hand, nodding us toward a table.

“They’re lucky you’re not Joanne Kates,” murmurs my wife. “She’d make this her lead paragraph.” But the hostess quickly redeems herself with a smile and an apology and we settle into our seats.

Perhaps traditional restaurant etiquette doesn’t apply in resto-lounges. If that is the case, we’d better get used to it because these hybrid establishments—part lounge bar, part restaurant—are suddenly all over town. I’ve been watching them closely since the millennium—first one, then five, now almost too many to count—and while most, I suspect, are fated to wither on the bough, the best of them constitute a fascinating new species. The appeal is obvious: a place with the dashing good looks, slightly edgy energy and excellent music of a lounge where you can also take your time over a delicious dinner. But it’s a difficult trick to perform. Instead of providing the best of both worlds, the vast majority fall short into clumsy mediocrity.

Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s proof that I haven’t grasped the concept when I marvel at a fashionably unshaven “sommelier” who can’t pronounce the names of the wine on his list. “What’s this viognier like?” I ask. He scratches his head. “The vonya? I don’t know, but that savvy-known’s supposed to be good. I haven’t tasted it, myself. How about a martini?” Clearly, I’ll have to go into this with an open mind.

It’s easy to see why an owner would like the resto-lounge idea. Restaurateurs watch the weekend hordes heading into clubs and wish they could harvest such numbers. Hearing a table of six debate where to go after dinner, they long for them to stay. Club proprietors share a similar dream: if only they could bring in the restaurant-goers with their heavy wallets in the quiet, early hours of the evening, the place would be busy from dusk to dawn.

The big problem, we have always been told, is that lounges and restaurants attract two distinct clienteles with very different agendas. Hence the failure of such mid-’90s attempts as Acrobat and Ivory, where serious diners felt oppressed by the bustle and noise of the bar and loungeniks found their style cramped by a room full of stuffy gastronomes. But the rule doesn’t hold true at Amber, Yorkville’s unique watering hole. In the winter months, Amber is a smart and intimate basement space where the same crowd comes to eat, drink and be merry. In the summer, the action moves up the steps at the back to a delightful patio overlooking the adjacent laneway. With its white-painted deck, comfortable sofas and long, covered bar, it reminds me of some cabana on one of the calmer Caribbean islands. The last time I dropped by, magazine editor Bonnie Fuller’s book launch was just breaking up and the place was awash with beautiful fashionistas, columnists from the society pages and the odd politician, almost all of them friends of the dapper, convivial owner, Toufik Sarwa. Many stayed on for cocktails, a few for dinner as darkness fell and candles were lit, the music drifting from house to jazz to French accordion torch songs.

The word “resto-lounge” had not yet been coined when Amber opened seven years ago (a lifetime in this particular demimonde), and the various expressions of the idea had not been fully explored. Sarwa jumped in at the deep end, aiming for the most difficult subcategory of the genre: the simultaneous dining-and-lounging double.

“We were the first to try it in Toronto,” he says, “inspired by places I had visited in Paris and New York. I knew I didn’t want a full-on restaurant, because then you lose the bar crowd. And I didn’t want to be one of those spots where everything changes at 11 and they clear away the tables whether you’ve finished dinner or not—that’s so tacky. But why not create somewhere you can have dinner in a relaxed atmosphere and then stay and order a bottle when the DJ comes on?”

Ah yes, bottle service. I have never quite understood the appeal of paying more for a bottle of vodka than the price of an equivalent number of cocktails—though some clubs demand that you do so if you want to sit in the VIP section. Sarwa finds that sort of rip-off obnoxious, and his bottle service is actually a bargain. But Amber’s real value lies in its charm. It’s hip but not chi-chi, and the customers, interestingly, range in age from 20 to 60, all hanging out together.