Caviar on a bone-marrow custard. Carnitas on a deftly textured tortilla. A Balinese chicken thigh with a crackly roof of skin. We loved them all this year—we crushed hard on fancy tasting menus and Filipino rice bowls, swooned over ceviches and tlacoyos. Where should you eat? We’re sending you here, to the Best New Restaurants in America. You’ll probably see us at the next table, because we can’t stop going back.

Jake Stangel

Esquire essayist Nora Ephron once said that it’s important for a person to eat her or his last meal strategically, before the actual onset of death, at a time when it can still be most relished. Should you want to follow her advice, book a table at Angler, in San Francisco, where through the front windows you’ll get a romantic view of the light show on the Bay Bridge.

As soon as you sit down, ask a waiter to bring you a dozen oysters as well as the Parker House rolls, which are served with butter and a bowl of caviar. Proceed to a whole purple sea urchin, the antelope tartare (trust us), the fried rabbit, its meat piping hot and almost puffy beneath a molten red crust. Surround that with a flotilla of sides: mushrooms, artichoke hearts, a single baked and sliver-sliced potato afloat on a tarn of chivey, creamy sauce. Finish with a bowl of fresh fruit—figs and plums and berries and a honey-smeared persimmon—and sorbets that taste more like melon and coconut than the fruits themselves.

With his twisted fixation on finding the Best Ingredient Right Now, hunting-capped gastro-savant Joshua Skenes presides over an elegantly laid-back space that feels like a woodsmoke-scented hunting lodge as conceived by Bryan Ferry. It’s an Avalon of pleasure and ease. Go while you’re still alive. 132 The Embarcadero

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When you dine at Atomix, you are given beautiful printed cards that accompany each course, elucidating every preparation: a deep-fried Scottish langoustine with creamed uni; golden osetra caviar atop an unlikely scoop of fresh cheese and braised baby artichoke; a bowl of nurungji, a Korean pudding made with “the golden crust that is formed at the bottom of the pot after making rice.” In this way, chef Jung­hyun Park, known as JP, is showing you the details behind his sleight of hand—telling you that the Wagyu strip loin is “lightly marinated with fermented fruit juice for 36 hours”—and yet you still can’t figure out how the damn magic trick works.

My dinner at Atomix left me reeling, and I came away with the sense that Park, who owns and runs the restaurant with his wife, Ellia, is on the brink of joining Eric Ripert, Dominique Crenn, and Daniel Humm as one of the top-echelon talents in America. His interpretation of Korean culinary tradition is both reverent and radical, and his fresh approach to the tasting menu made me fall back in love with a format that I had come to loathe. As JP writes on one of the cards, “My goal at the end of the day is to have made your lives a bit brighter and a bit happier through the experience that we have created at Atomix.” And he does. 104 East Thirtieth Street

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When the Nancy cakes arrived, I told myself that I wasn’t going to finish them. But reader, I couldn’t stop. Hot, fluffy flapjacks of corn paired with trout roe and wild honey and an obscene smear of cultured butter—salty and creamy and sweet—God in heaven, these cakes must’ve been chemically engineered to turn my palate into their willing puppet. All of the food I was served at Nancy’s Hustle was like that: My discipline evaporated like mist in the Texas heat. Leeks vinaigrette, a cheeseburger worthy of a drag race in a James Dean flick—no wonder there’s a line out the door by 6:00.

I don’t know how to categorize the cooking at this place other than to say that Nancy’s Hustle, where executive chef Jason Vaughan and pastry chef Julia Doran and cocktail master Kristine Nguyen seem to operate in deft sync, is like a roadside diner in which a bunch of Michelin-starred talents are secretly hiding out, thanks to the witness-protection program. 2704 Polk Street

Courtesy of Misi

Is Missy Robbins clairvoyant? How else would she know—with such exactitude—just what we want to eat right now? With Misi, her sequel to the pulsatingly popular Lilia, she and business partner Sean Feeney have edited the menu down to a haiku of hunger.

You start with a series of vital vegetable dishes (slow-roasted tomatoes kissed with hot honey, soft grilled artichokes splashed with a minty salsa verde) and then the pastas. Linguine and fettuccine, pappardelle and stran­gozzi, corzetti and occhi: In Missy Robbins’s kitchen, these very words become a kind of cheese-and-pepper-dusted incantation. You finish up with gelato. She has spent countless hours fine-tuning that gelato, hunting for the right milk, the right mint, the right olive oil. Knowing that, you’ll want to savor it patiently, but you won’t be able to. 329 Kent Avenue

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Chef of the Year: Missy Robbins

These are crazy times. We need comfort, we need sustenance, we need to get back to basics. Missy Robbins knows this in her bones. Misi makes the very most of minimalism. “Keep it simple” is its credo, and in her hands, serving you a perfect bowl of noodles with butter and cheese becomes a spiritual act, a secular serenity prayer amid the frothing, nerve-shredding lunacy of the news cycle.

Courtesy of Celeste

“Eh, excuse me—is this that Peruvian restaurant or are you guys just throwing a party in here?”

At Celeste, hospitality and home entertaining merge into an instant and intimate bash. There are flames dancing off the frying pans. Co-owner Maria Rondeau is smiling and ushering some sort of purple cocktail to your table. South American psychedelia is choogling out of the speakers (music so good you’ll want to jot down the names of the songs), and chef JuanMa Calderón—a noted indie-film director back home in Peru—is cranking out ceviches and causas that radiate flavor and soul. Is this really New England or did we pass through some kind of magic Andean portal? Either way, dinner at Celeste is the most fun you’ll have anywhere within twenty miles of Boston. 21 Bow Street

Courtesy of The DeBruce

Remember this name: Aksel Theilkuhl. A former lieutenant of Laurent Tourondel, Theilkuhl is a chef with family roots in the Dominican Republic who is pulling off something consistently remarkable at a chic next-generation inn in the Catskills that’s usually full of leaf peepers and babymooners. He’s cooking food that’s so delicious—rooted in the bounty of what can be farmed and foraged from the surrounding landscape—that when I first tasted it, I stood up, walked over to the kitchen, and started peppering the poor man with questions.

The guy can roast you a chicken with Robuchon-worthy mashed potatoes on a winter’s night, and he can lay out a tasting menu that’ll make you wonder, through course after course, whether Noma has established a secret outpost on the banks of the Willowemoc. The cooking comforts and mesmerizes; so does the view: Everything happens in a quiet, wide-windowed dining room that overlooks the curves of a mountain range. 982 Debruce Road

Courtesy of Bavel

The food at the humming Bavel is the food of the Middle East as interpreted by the minds of two imaginative people, owners and chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis. If you can’t identify precisely where in the Middle East halvah is made with foie gras, and hummus is crowned with spicy duck ’nduja, that’s by design. The married duo behind Bestia have liberated these dishes from the borders of tradition, creating a delicious twenty-first-century hybrid of the personal and the historical.

They make bread so alive it seems to breathe. They make mushrooms so tasty—spiked on a skewer and licked by flames—that they’re better than meat. They fry up quail with enough expertise that you might mistake Menashe for a Mississippian. Regardless of where you’re from, eating at Bavel tastes like coming home. 500 Mateo Street

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Pastry Chef of the Year: Genevieve Gergis

The dessert I still dream about from the summer of 2018 is one with a steep degree of difficulty: a creamy, multi-textured bon bon suffused—bracingly, boldly—with the flavor of black licorice from Denmark. Gergis is responsible for that bitter beauty, and it is her determined obsession that led to its difficult birth. All of her desserts are lovely, but that bon bon is special—think of it as a noir treat from the city that gave us Raymond Chandler.

Courtesy of El Jardín

You say you love Mexican food, but have you ever tried a tlacoyo? You want one. It’s a street snack that tastes like a cross between a tamale and a custard, and El Jardín is one of the few places in the United States where I’ve seen it.

On a lively patio about twenty miles from the Mexican border, chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins is serving up an uncompromising alternative to the rice-and-beans combo plates that have put San Diegans into a food coma for decades. Zepeda-Wilkins relies on a backyard garden to bring an immediacy of freshness to everything she cooks. Her aquachile, with raw wild shrimp basking in the cut hull of a coconut, practically shimmers with heat and sweetness. She even redeems taquitos, stuffing them with braised short ribs and turning a stoner fallback into a master class on the timeless relationship between the tender and the crisp. 2885 Perry Road

Matt Lien

True story: As I stood outside Hai Hai in early spring, a truck sped by on University Avenue and sprayed me from head to toe with dirty snow and gutter water. It’s a testament to the sunny energy of Hai Hai that I didn’t care.

By then I’d been filled up with chef Christina Nguyen’s water fern cakes; her fried wontons, all melty inside with cream cheese and chicken livers; her showstopping Balinese chicken thigh under a roof of crispy skin and on a bed of coconut-creamed jasmine rice. Banana blossoms, sugarcane, sticky rice, and green papaya—Nguyen’s menu reads like a street-smitten ode to Southeast Asia, a pop song that can brighten up even the murkiest of days in L’Étoile du Nord. 2121 University Avenue NE

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Rising Star of the Year: Christina Nguyen

After I ate at Hai Hai, I search-engined Nguyen; I knew zilch about her, at that point, and I figured she must have a résumé that name-checked some of the top restaurants around the world. I was wrong. She got her start running an arepa truck. The deep understanding of flavor that she displays at Hai Hai is the result of life experience and raw talent, not some tony pedigree. In an age when far too many young chefs are phoning it in with beet salads and predictable globs of burrata, Nguyen cooks with a fresh vantage point on what it means to feed the people.

Brian Caron

Here’s what Alejandro Paredes does: He makes carnitas, the pork all crackly and creamy from its own slow-melted fat. He makes tortillas, too—with the right chewy texture from the griddle and a pronounced flavor of corn—and he makes salsas that pretty much hum with life.

Here’s what you do: You park your car and step inside and order a couple tacos filled with that carnitas (and maybe a quesadilla laced with his house-made chorizo), and you sit outside at a picnic table and eat your food and send up prayers to whichever deities govern the realm of tacos and appetite, because in this instance you are fortunate beyond measure. Mexican food in the United States doesn’t get any more delicious and honest than this. 1107 Roosevelt Avenue

Marvin Shaouni

Kate Williams is running the show here, so look sharp. With restaurants around the country experiencing painful spasms of self-analysis in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning that obliterated the careers of accused chefs like Mario Batali and John Besh, Lady of the House could be viewed as a prototype for a new path forward.

Williams, who has Irish-American family roots in the Corktown neighborhood where she cooks, pays close attention to the well-being (and diversity) of her employees—so much so that, like a proud mama, she hangs their childhood photos in a hallway by the kitchen. Naturally she fosters a relaxed, homespun vibe in the dining room, delivering food that comes across as down-to-earth even though tremendous care has gone into it.

The magnificently delicious “carrot steak” may carry an echo of a dish associated with Relæ, the pioneering New Nordic spot in Copenhagen, but the rum cake? Williams got that recipe directly from her mother. 1426 Bagley Street

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Caviar caps an eggshell full of bone-marrow custard. Oysters hover suspended in a briny floral gelée beneath a spray of rose petals. A Paris-Brest from pastry virtuoso Juan Contreras becomes a pale-green study in the love affair between sugar and salt. The prices are punishingly high, yes. Bar Crenn, chef Dominique Crenn’s boudoirlike wine-centric annex to her three-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn, can be viewed only as a splurge. But if you’re going to gouge yourself into bankruptcy, you might as well do it right. 3131 Fillmore Street

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In a 1930s gas station that looks like dusty scenery from The Grapes of Wrath, in a room decorated with anime and skulls, to a soundtrack of Rage Against the Machine, chef Misti Norris is conjuring funk. A motto at the restaurant is “farm, forage, fermentation, and fire,” but it is definitely funk that those other four f’s result in—dishes (served in the sort of paper boats that I associate with chili-cheese fries) that seem to writhe with flavor.

Consider her fried chicken hearts wrapped in a pale-green garlic crepe, or her pigtails with sour purple cabbage. Her background is Cajun, but that doesn’t really help you locate her inspiration. As far as I can tell, her cooking appears to be Narnian. 601 North Haskell Avenue

Courtesy of The Love

By now, the phrase “farm to table” may make you sigh, but Aimee Olexy reminds us that the concept is simply about coming back to the life force of fresh ingredients. The crudités at the Love have such a Marvel Comics splash of color that I almost checked to see whether the plate had tiny stage lights; the Caesar salad, in which chef Charles Parker dresses ribs of romaine and fronds of dandelion in a vinaigrette that makes a briny-sweet coupling of anchovies and figs, is so freshly bouncy with firmness that I wondered whether Olexy and business partner Stephen Starr had planted a farm a few steps away in Rittenhouse Square. Don’t sleep on the fried chicken, embroidered with tawny gnarls of crust. Two bites and I knew why they call it the Lovebird. 130 South Eighteenth Street

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A squat box in a neighborhood north of downtown Detroit is probably not where you’d expect to find seafood as glorious as the offerings at, say, Kødbyens Fiskebar in Denmark or Elkano in Spain. But order the Dungeness crab with fermented mayo, and the tuna on toast, and a dozen or so oysters, and you might trick yourself into catching a whiff of an ocean breeze in the midwestern air.

The high-quality cooking makes sense when you consider the pedigree of chefs Jennifer Jackson and Justin Tootla, who’ve logged hours on the good ships Prune and Le Bernardin. I could eat here twice a week, you’ll think. Pull up a beach chair and start shucking. 600 Vester Street

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A guy stands next to your table and heats up a spoon with a blowtorch. He then slides the hot metal into a tub of sobrasada, a spicy scarlet-hued sausage that has been shipped in from Majorca, and he instructs you to spread the red stuff on crisp, wispy loaves of pan de cristal that have been shipped in from Barcelona—with a drizzle of chestnut honey to top it off.

This is how your meal begins at Del Mar, Fabio and Maria Trabocchi’s love letter to Spain. He’s the chef—and, yes, Italian—but Maria’s roots in Madrid help ensure Iberian integrity, from the croquetas to the paella. It’s no mean feat to succeed with Spanish food in the city where José Andrés holds court, but at the grand, sweeping Del Mar, Team Trabocchi proves that our nation’s capital is big enough for more than one escalivada. 791 Wharf Street SW



Krescent Carasso/Courtesy of Don Angie

Che Fico is big and booming, with Blur and Devo serenading you as you scarf down chef David Nayfeld’s truffled gnocchi and ricotta-stuffed squash blossoms and (yes) pineapple pizza. Don Angie is tight-quartered and intimate, with a haute-Jersey aesthetic that would make Frank Sinatra feel at home even if Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli’s chrysanthemum salad and pepperoni fried rice might’ve thrown Ol’ Blue Eyes for a loop. Both places confirm a great American truth on both coasts: When you ache for a fun night out, you can never go wrong with Italian. 838 Divisadero; 103 Greenwich Avenue

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“It’s just cool there,” the novelist (and New Orleans resident) Jami Attenberg told me when I emailed her about Longway Tavern. She’s right, and what’s surprising about that is that this refuge of refreshment murmurs discreetly in the midst of the tourist-clotted French Quarter.

Longway, as led by chef John Sinclair and bar guru Liam Deegan, is the pub you wish you could park in for a few years. Sip a perfect Sazerac while you marvel at snacks that conjure the Big Easy without trying to copy traditional creole tropes. The chicken sandwich is lusciously smeared with chicken livers; the peas—yes, peas!—bathe in cauliflower cream under a crust of breadcrumbs and country ham. 719 Toulouse Street

Courtesy of Karenderya

In the future, we pray, thousands of small towns in America will have Filipino restaurants as excellent as this one, with adobo pork belly braised to crispy meltiness atop garlic rice, and shrimp aswim in a coconut broth that tastes like French cream, and a cassava-jackfruit cake that comes across like a cobbler in which the topping and the filling have magically merged, and a smart beer list that highlights the best of Hudson Valley breweries.

For now, Karenderya serves as exciting evidence that the #filipinofoodmovement is making inroads in suburbia, thanks to co-owners Cheryl Baun (the cake is her mother’s recipe) and chef Paolo Garcia Mendoza, a veteran of Tabla in Manhattan. Theirs is a warm, family-friendly enclave, and if you visit, you’re going to wind up wishing it were a block away from your house. 248 Main Street

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Courtesy of Grand Café

When the chef Jamie Malone moved into the decades-old Grand Café space last year, she found a big, glorious Baker Boy oven from 1952. She quickly put it to use transporting diners back to the postwar Paris of their dreams. A pastry filled with chicken-liver mousse; pike quenelles; grilled oysters with shallot cream; pork pâté en croûte—Malone's is a menu that would've made Julia Child swoon, and it's all served in a hygge-forward room where Fred Rogers would've felt cozy in his cardigan.

T.J. Kirkpatrick /NY Times/Redux

In spite of his Korean-American background, chef Edward Lee isn’t famous for cooking Asian food. In fact, what he and his crew plate up at Succotash bears the biscuits-and-bourbon imprint of the many years Lee spent in Kentucky. Stroll past the throngs waiting for a table, though, and you’ll find a separate room, outfitted with Chinese lanterns, in which Lee is quietly, modestly giving you a glimpse of the sort of food that he remembers from his childhood and still often makes at home for his daughter: pork belly that you swaddle in lettuce leaves and speckle with ssamjang and (oddly, brilliantly) crispy fried chickpeas; tender, chewy dumplings stuffed with sweet potato or duck confit.

Lee, a restless and peripatetic fellow who authored this year’s Buttermilk Graffiti, plans to keep Mr. Lee’s up and running for the rest of the year, maybe longer. If you go, do me a favor and urge him to make this pop-up a permanent installation.

Alli Peters

A lanky, excitable gent with one of the coolest names in the business, Zappia floored me with his percolating creativity when I visited Minnesota. If cocktail making has become a bit too enamored with itself in recent years (hey, sometimes you just want a drink, not a dissertation), Zappia may be the antidote. His bibulous experiments recall the curveballs associated with Dave Arnold at the much-missed Booker and Dax and Kevin Denton at the much-missed wd-50, but he never loses sight of the fact that drinking is ultimately supposed to be, um, fun.

An Rong Xu/NY Times/Redux

What makes a bistro even better? How about a revolutionary array of natural wines from around the world, hand-picked and poured with a cool backstory courtesy of Jorge Riera, Manhattan's gentle champion of everything biodynamic, orange, and rare. You go to Frenchette for the food, but the wine list is what makes you hang on to your table for a few extra hours.



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Check out Jeff Gordinier on Instagram @TheGordinier for a behind-the-scenes look at this year's Best New Restaurants selection process.

ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI