when you want, where you want.
The Absolute Best New Restaurants of 2024
Photo: Thomas Prior/
In picking our favorite new restaurants of the year, we threw price and prestige out the window to focus on spots that we think most completely achieved the goals they set for themselves, whether that’s building the best new East Village taco shop or a 16th-floor tasting-menu oasis. The only criterion we weighed was deliciousness, and the most difficult part of this assignment was limiting ourselves to just ten places. (We saw so much that we assembled a separate list of the best sandwiches, momos, doughnuts, and noodles, among a pile of other highlights.) But the places below stood out in an extremely crowded field by getting a million little details right and forcing us to ask ourselves that all-important question: When can we go back?
Bridges
After opening in September, Bridges quickly became that rare thing: a buzzy new restaurant that refused to compromise on either its vibes or its values. Visits tend to include sightings of notable local art directors and dishes that aren’t served anywhere else (despite frequent comparisons with Estela, where chef Sam Lawrence spent several years cooking): the best-selling Comté tart; eel dumplings in chicken broth. For all its high-design gloss, Bridges has a scrappy, keep-at-it-till-it-sings mentality in the kitchen. That may be why an entrée of pork was still finding its way in the early days while sweetbreads glazed with soy had fully arrived. 9 Chatham Sq., nr. Doyers St.; bridges-nyc.com
Briscola
Any Italian restaurant can call itself a trattoria, but few make good on the core tenants of generosity and conviviality like Briscola. It’s small enough to feel like a secret, albeit one that’s always full. The menu is heavy on starters and pastas to pass around, such as head cheese flavored with a splash of Campari and served hot on bread with snappy giardiniera; and fresh-egg pasta tossed with either a sweetbread ragù or Bolognese that appears with a sidecar of sauce to make sure everyone gets an extra scoop. At the end of the meal, a dessert cart arrives loaded with sweets from the kitchen and a pink cassata Siciliana — marzipan wrapped around sweet ricotta and sponge cake — from Settepani Bakery. 798A Franklin Ave., nr. Eastern Pkwy., Crown Heights; briscolabk.com
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Carnitas Ramirez
Giovanni Cervantes and Tania Apolinar were first-time restaurateurs when they opened Taqueria Ramirez, which immediately established them as New York taco royalty. Now, with partners Yvon de Tassigny and Kari Boden, they’ve turned their attention to carnitas. This is primal pork, a coterie of cuts and offal mingling in simmering fat. Variety — the jiggliness of snout, heaps of jowl, tender lengua, two types of belly (fried or extra fried), chewy uterus — sets Ramirez apart even from the New Wave of carnitas specialists. For a more comprehensive taco, get the glistening surtida, a medley of pig parts and textures. 210 E. 3rd St., at Ave. B.; carnitasramirez.com
Cocina Consuelo
Is this restaurant home to the Pancake of the Year? And are we crazy for using the phrase “Pancake of the Year”? Yes, but these — made of masa and served in amber-hued honey butter — are worth getting worked up over. There’s a contagious ebullience to Cocina Consuelo, starting with the façade painted Jolly Rancher blue and carrying over into the cooking. Chef Karina Garcia grew up nearby, but the restaurant was inspired by the trips she and her husband, co-owner Lalo Rodriguez, took to visit his grandmother in Puebla. Along with those pancakes, there are steaming cups of café de olla and picaditas made into little mountains with herby chorizo verde, crema, and crumbled queso fresco. Come evening, the lights are dimmed and the falsetto of Son de Madera’s “La Guanabana” fills the room. From behind the bar, Garcia and her cooks send out bowls of baby potatoes dressed with chipotle and jalapeños stuffed with tuna that get cooked in olive oil according to the Rodriguez-family recipe. 130 Hamilton Pl., at W. 143rd St.; cocinaconsuelonyc.com
Joo Ok
On the 16th floor of an unbecoming midtown commercial building — accessible by freight elevator — Hand Hospitality built a traditional Korean hanok, a serene, wood-paneled space whose automated shades drowse gently as the sun descends. (Sunset over midtown: Who knew you could still find romance in that?) Its proprietor is Chang-ho Shin, whose tower-perched Joo Ok in Seoul had been collecting awards since 2016. In search of a new challenge, he took himself and several of his cooks to New York. His ten courses, priced at $180 a head, are fussy but wondrous: They include a tiny fried cube of tender braised chicken with perilla aïoli, finely ground Wagyu tartare beneath a jellied disc of egg yolk in a crisp and taro-y tofu-skin tart shell, a whole prawn fried in rice powder and served in chitinous sections, and lobster with tahinilike pine-nut sauce. 22 W. 32nd St., nr. Fifth Ave.; joo-ok.com
Photo: Thomas Prior
Kanyakumari
Chef Dipesh Shinde’s wide-ranging menu is a tour of his travels along the Indian coastline. Every meal should start with a round of curd-rice croquettes, India’s answer to arancini, and mussels Koliwada, which are breaded in rice flour and served crisp on the half-shell with a pour of the tart pink drink sol kadhi: simultaneously crunchy, spicy, and cooling. A curry from the port town of Kozhikode is flavored with curry leaves, ginger, and mustard seeds and poured over whole fish from an oversize seashell, while Malabar short ribs smothered with pepper and onion show “coastal cuisine” is about more than just seafood. 20 E. 17th St., nr. Union Sq. W.; kanyakumarinyc.com
Le Veau d’Or
In November, some punk chivied off the decades-old brass plaque that announced Le Veau d’Or to passersby. As crimes against heritage go, this is roughly akin to spitting on the Eiffel Tower. But it’s a sign of current caretakers Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr’s good grace that the restaurant was as horrified as anyone else. Their revival of this New York institution could have been a bottom-up redesign, but it wasn’t — it’s a loving conservation, from the room to the menu, ensuring that the restaurant feels recognizably like a version of what it was, not least because of the old regulars who still claim their seats at the tiny bar or cram into a booth for duck with cherries and buttery frogs’ legs. If the plaque never returns, cast one of those legs in its stead. 129 E. 60th St., nr. Lexington Ave.; lvdnyc.com
Photo: Thomas Prior
Penny
Penny is familiar in form and revelatory in content. The idea — a marble counter dedicated almost entirely to fresh seafood and French wine — will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time in Paris or Boston, yet the “icebox” platters of mussels and oysters and trout-vichyssoise shooters are an ideal counterpoint to the shellfish towers being stacked around town. The warm loaves of brioche served with anchovies are the rare bread course that is justifiably famous in its own right. And there may be no finer crustacean in New York than the cracked lobster that is simply painted with tarragon-heavy herb butter before it’s served in a big pile. 90 E. 10th St., nr. Third Ave.; penny-nyc.com
Sawa
Here, the hearth is right up front with a baker pressing out whole-wheat pitas to order. They are delivered, puffy and plush, with every dip, like the finely textured hummus with beef cheeks in a tangy pomegranate glaze that has become a signature dish, though the baba ghannouj with a pool of olive oil and fried garlic is equally worthy of the honor. Nothing is as simple as it looks: Kibbeh nayeh is for lamb lovers, with a scallion salad that’s as sharp as the raw meat is intense, while fluke crudo comes swimming in a spicy cucumber juice, sprinkled with black-lime zest and a powerful blend of dried basil, marjoram, mint, and cumin. The kitchen’s best trick is the amount of garlic it packs into the crust of the crunchy potato squares, unabashedly served alongside an even-more-garlicky toum. 75 Fifth Ave., nr. Prospect Pl., Park Slope; sawa.nyc
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Photo: Thomas Prior/
Strange Delight
The saltines alone — fried until they achieve a suntanned shade of mahogany and are ready for dunking — would warrant this restaurant’s inclusion on the list, but the real reason we loved partners Anoop Pillarisetti, Michael Tuiach, and Ham El-Waylly’s seafood bar is the way they took all the best parts of eating in New Orleans — the fresh seafood, the strong cocktails, the liberal use of a deep-fryer — and left the Mardi Gras trappings behind to create the best kind of New York local spot, where neighbors might be tempted to drop in once or twice a week for a catfish sandwich or a basket of breaded oysters washed back with a wet martini. 63 Lafayette Ave., nr. Fulton St. ,Fort Greene; strangedelight.nyc
Related