Michael Momm, meanwhile, who helped open Zum Schneider on Avenue C in 2000 and now owns two Loreley beer gardens (one in Brooklyn, the other on the Lower East Side), claimed to be unbothered by the current beer-garden glut, competition being the natural outgrowth of capitalism. Mr. Momm said, somewhat shockingly, that in the recent past some of his rivals have spied on his establishments (“We’ve had people come in, talking to the staff, like where did you get your furniture and so forth”). But he chalked this up to the constant search for a tactical advantage in the dog-eat-dog beer garden trade.

“That’s how it goes,” he said. “I don’t necessarily see it as a threat.”

It is difficult to trace the precise genealogy of the city’s beer gardens — the first of which was said to be Castle Garden, which opened on July 3, 1824, in a former Army fort in Manhattan’s Battery Park. (It later preceded Ellis Island as New York’s primary immigrant processing center.) In the early 20th century, German sections of the city —Yorkville on the Upper East Side, for one — had several beer gardens, but they eventually suffered from anti-Teutonic sentiment during the two world wars.

Of the city’s extant beer gardens, the Bohemian Hall, owned and operated by the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, stands in a class by itself. Under it are the middle-aged beer gardens: Hallo Berlin on 10th Avenue (“New York’s wurst restaurant”); Killmeyer’s on Arthur Kill Road in Staten Island (sauerbraten, 57 different bottles of German beer); and Zum Schneider (fake trees, pretzels, St. Pauli Girl waitresses). Then, of course, there are the arrivistes: places like Berry Park in Williamsburg, with its D.J. booth and Tuesday night poker games, and Studio Square in Astoria, with — Was ist das? — sushi and panko-crusted chicken schnitzel fingers.

There is no doubt, however, that Mr. Batali’s La Birreria — which, its brew master said, will be the first beer garden in America to employ firkins, nine-gallon, old-English-style carbonation casks — represents the epitome of an increasingly baroque, gourmetized trend. One of its ales will be bolstered by ground Italian chestnut powder. Talk of the establishment is said to have begun six years ago at a “slow food” conference in Turin.

“I hear beer garden and it connotes oompah bands and picnic tables,” said the brew master, Sam Calagione, the founder of the Dogfish Head brewery. “But La Birreria will be a place for super-rustic, unfiltered, naturally carbonated beers accompanied by super-rustic, fresh-ingredient, Alps-inspired food.” Not to mention, he added, “The view is just epic.”

How did this come to pass?

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that New York’s drinking zeitgeist has passed, in succession, from the Belle Epoque-ish wine bar to the pre-crash Jazz Age cocktail lounge, to the Weimar-flavored biergarten, with its whiffs of hyperinflation and the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Of course, it is also true that people like beer and will tend to drink it in large amounts, while sitting outside at long, communal tables in the sun.