This year, it started in the bathrooms.

All of a sudden, those once spare spaces—a candle burning, perhaps a dried plant, a letterpress card insisting that employees wash their hands—exploded into riots of graphic excess. The wallpaper alone! Jungle scenes and palm trees! Lobsters and sharks, birds of all varieties, bursting fields of flowers! Some nights it was like trying to pee while surrounded by a phalanx of large men in Hawaiian shirts, or like being buried alive in a Gucci sarcophagus.

Once spotted, this new exuberance was impossible not to notice back out in the dining room: I dined beneath jungle canopies—greenery protruding from the walls, vines stretching down from the ceiling, not altogether benignly. I ate off mismatched, wildly printed granny china, as if at a Mad Tea Party. All of this has been duly noted by the watchers of design trends and, on the one hand, it's merely a predictable cyclical turn: Ties expand; ties contract; ties disappear. Minimalism gives way to ornamentation. One day you've got naked ducts and unfinished concrete; the next you're in a community-theater production of Little Shop of Horrors.

At the same time, I began to sense that there was something more at play. Maybe it was the moment, in a New Orleans restaurant, when a dancer fully clad in Brazilian Carnival dress went strolling past our table and nobody broke conversation. It occurred to me that I had been at the carnival for months. Our restaurant-comfort moment seems to have morphed into a circus moment. Sometimes all that wallpaper feels like a joyful expression; other times, like a warm embrace. But often it also feels like a mouth frozen open in a grin of barely contained hysteria.

Like many people, I've spent the past two and a half years viewing American life through the filter of the Donald Trump presidency and all it represents. In the dining world, that has largely meant two obvious categories: Restaurants of Refuge (like Georgia James) and Restaurants of Resistance (like Indigo). I'm suggesting a third classification of restaurants that more directly hold a mirror to the anxiety and surreality of the present moment. I call them Restaurants of Derangement. And why not? It's become a cliché to note that the root of restaurant is “to restore”—but not only things made nice (to use another buzz phrase) can be restorative. We like rom-coms but also horror movies, Norman Rockwell but also Otto Dix, holding hands in the tunnel of love and white knuckles on the roller coaster.

Bowl of ripe fruit at Angler. Bonjwing Lee

For me, that was the key to decoding Angler, Joshua Skenes's shiny, theatrical fine-dining seafood house on San Francisco's Embarcadero. I'm not suggesting that an afternoon spent eating immaculately shucked oysters while overlooking the Bay Bridge isn't a luxurious comfort. But look around and you can't help but notice that the place is kinda weird. The open kitchen that stretches across the entire back of the space is hung with copper pans, bundles of herbs, and dried fish dangling from twine. It looks like a collaboration between Escoffier and the set dresser from Pirates of the Caribbean. A back room is styled as a hunting lodge, filled with taxidermy (not just the kind you find in dime-a-dozen Brooklyn bars, either; there's a full bear). The soundtrack is straight '80s classics, the kind you think are irritating until you find yourself singing along. The weirdness continues on the plate. Antelope tartare appears in a thin disc as glossily crimson as pomegranate seeds, to be scooped up in lettuce cups flecked with herbs. It is exquisite. Parker House rolls come to the table crammed into a silver bowl like a hiding octopus. You receive a cloth bib, which you fasten with lovely alligator clips before attacking a grilled head of radicchio filled with beet juice, fried shallot, and an XO sauce made from its own core. The dish leaves you with blood-red vampire teeth. Then, as though a switch has been thrown, the kitchen suddenly swerves into minimalism. For main courses, the printed plates are replaced with plain white plates. Seafood appears on them almost unadorned: striped bass beneath a plank of scored, perfectly crisp skin; scallops cooked to the precise balance of firm and wobbly that almost gives the impression they are breathing. The same simple butter sauce comes on several preparations, accompanied by a muslin-clad half-lemon, as though you're suddenly at Tadich Grill, the classic seafood house a half-mile away, or Galatoire's, in New Orleans. It is a move that's immensely confident, and not a little unhinged.