It’s hard to imagine now, but before 1980, New York had no cilantro outside of Chinatown, hardly any carpaccio, and even less chipotle mayonnaise. I know because I became the food editor and restaurant critic of the New York Daily News in early 1979, after nine years of reporting on food for Newsday.

This dark, pre-balsamic era is much in the minds of New York foodies lately: The restaurants that opened then and moved the culinary world forward are now celebrating milestone anniversaries. Union Square Cafe, often voted New York’s favorite restaurant, opened in 1985. That was five years after Chanterelle opened with a post-Nouvelle Cuisine menu in an archly undecorated SoHo storefront. Florent, the pioneer restaurant of the Meatpacking District, is celebrating 20 years of hosting New York’s night crawlers. Capsouto Freres is now 20 years old, too. Around the same time, Drew Nieporent opened Montrachet, with David Bouley as the chef. Odeon, the last of the ’80s-era grand cafes, is now celebrating its 20th year as well. These were cutting-edge restaurants when they opened. And now they are the classics.

What came into fruition in the 1980s was really an outgrowth of developments that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Consider that while Julia Child made her television debut in 1963 – making fine food accessible – the counterculture hippies were serving up vegetarian, organic, biodynamic commune cuisine. It amounted to a heavy hill of beans with brown rice, cheese, and broccoli. Still, it was that back-to-the-earth sensibility – with its glorification of agricultural pursuits, craftsmanship, and personal fulfillment – that helped shape the food and restaurant revolution of the 1980s.

Chef Alice Waters, who is often cited as the mother of New American Cuisine, was a product of 1960s Berkeley radicalism. I remember when she attended an early City Meals on Wheels gala at Rockefeller Center. She made roasted new potatoes with herbs. Other chefs looked at her food and said, “That’s not cooking. It’s shopping,” to which Ms. Waters answered, “So you get it.”

What also influenced the ’80s was the revolutionary ’70s French movement La Nouvelle Cuisine. It emphasized freshness, too, but with studied, artful presentations. Chefs traded butter-enriched “emulsions” for flour-thickened sauces and called the food “lighter.” But it was lighter only because the portions were so small and plated with the precision of Japanese flower arrangements. The fetish for presentation is still with us – and so are the sauces.

We can also blame the concept of “celebrity chef” on the practitioners of La Nouvelle Cuisine. Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, and Roger Verge became darlings of television and the press. Not only that, the U.S. Department of Labor reclassified chefs in 1979, listing them as “professionals” instead of as “domestics.”

As all this developed, so did the no-holds-barred materialism of the Reagan years. In 1981, the AIDS virus was identified, which meant no more sex and no more Studio 54. So here we were, needing a substitute for drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Enter a new day of food hedonism.

The popular culture was now dominated by the yuppies, who wanted to “have it all,” which meant interesting food in highly designed restaurants – along with luxury cars, designer clothes, good co-op addresses, and Hamptons weekend houses. For yuppies to see and be seen, the ’80s spawned grand cafes. Canastel and Joanna were early Flatiron district haunts. A New York version of La Coupole in Paris was installed in the Murray Hill space Artisanal is in today. Ernie’s, on the Upper West Side, an Italian grand cafe, closed only last year. The Gotham Bar and Grill started as a grand cafe, too. Conceived as a restaurant where you could order chicken soup with matzo balls but be stylish, it failed. By the mid-’80s, New York had already moved beyond its own ethnic traditions. Gotham Bar and Grill kept the name, but morphed into chef Alfred Portale’s laboratory for tall food. And he, too, has recently enjoyed a 20-year anniversary in Gotham’s kitchen.

Looking back, it was an exciting time to be eating, and I’m still trying to lose the weight.

Mr. Schwartz’s latest book is “Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More Than 100 Legendary Recipes” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).