Like a '90s nightclub plopped into the middle of Lincoln Center, Tatiana glows blue and chain-link gold, blasts Lauryn Hill and Biggie, and serves the most exciting food we've tasted at a fancy restaurant, ever. We're especially fond of the absurdly tender short rib pastrami suya, served with caraway coco bread, inviting you to build sliders. Tatiana is one of the hardest reservations in town, but for a restaurant that feels like a paradigm shift in New York fine dining, it’s well worth it.

You could make the argument that old-school fine dining is boring and antiquated. And that would be a pretty compelling argument, if it weren’t for Le Bernardin. This Midtown institution, which has been open for over 30 years now, is a well-oiled machine that’s been fine-tuned to perfection. Geoduck chawanmushi with uni and soft-crunchy sea beans in pork dashi, langoustine and buttery leeks in uni sauce americaine—you book a reservation at Le Bernardin primarily to get your hands on these.

L’Industrie’s owner, a native of Tuscany, subjects his dough to a three-day cold fermentation, resulting in a crust that’s airy, crisp, thin as a saltine, and stiff enough to support dots of ricotta and strips of bacon. Whether you visit the original Williamsburg or West Village location—which has a bit more indoor seating— there’s going to be a line, but it’ll move fast. Place your order at the counter, then watch as they finish your hot slice with olive oil, parm, and torn leaves of basil.

This East 60th Street bistro was founded in 1937, and is—after a five-year revamp from the Frenchette people—way more fun than that makes it sound. This place always had the trappings of a special, two-bottle night out: low ceilings, quirky paintings (a sleeping calf, the previous owner’s yacht), and a booth that was once frequented by Orson Welles. Now, it also has the food. Le Veau d’Or is the first place we’d recommend for an extra-special, extra splashy date night.

Sitting on a low plastic stool, or perched on a bench at Mắm, it’s easy to form a close relationship with all the flavors and textures on your plate. Like the seating, the Vietnamese food here is uncompromising—from the tofu that’s made fresh every day to the perfectly springy blood sausage. Minty, citrusy herbs tangle with silky poached eggs, chicken feet, and snails stuffed with pork. Little bowls of different dipping sauces tie individual ingredients together in bite after spectacular bite.

The inside of this place quite literally sparkles like a disco ball, with golden Nolita light hitting its bamboo-weaved walls and bakery case of cakes and pastries. Most importantly, every section on Thai Diner’s menu has undeniable “f*ck yeah″ energy. Order the disco fries smothered with massaman curry, the cabbage rolls stuffed with turkey and jasmine rice, and the sai oua breakfast roti whose blend of textures would win Project Runway.

From the people behind Carbone and The Grill, this Nolita restaurant is a big-budget production with precariously high ceilings, crushed velvet booths, and servers dressed for a wedding in Southampton. It’s the sort of place where you’d expect food to be an afterthought, but every section of the Italian-ish menu is filled with highlights. Start with the fennel salad that’s infinitely more exciting than it sounds, and follow that up with the prawn raviolini and rotisserie lamb.

This walk-in-only Koreatown restaurant is going to wow you, but not with caviar, wagyu, or crisp white tablecloths. There’s none of that here. Only Korean classics piled unpretentiously onto plates that are ferried from an open kitchen by servers in matching polos. Open since 1997, Cho Dang Gol is the best at what it does: homestyle food you reminisce about the moment you hit the outside world.

Our initial review of Via Carota, for example, was pretty lukewarm. But that was back in 2015, a confusing time when bone broth was the beverage du jour and electric hoverboards were catching on fire. With its perfect mix of casual, buzzy atmosphere and impressive, unfussy food, this West Village restaurant has grown on us immensely over the years. Just be sure to arrive before 6pm. Via Carota is essentially walk-in only, with limited reservations, and we aren’t the only ones who love it here.

People like to say that certain restaurants feel like someone’s living room. But unless those people are talking about Shaw-naé's House—a six-table soul food destination on Staten Island—we don’t really believe them. Inside the ground floor of a clapboard house in Stapleton Heights, people from all over the city sit on couches next to a faux fireplace, waiting for some of the city’s best collard greens, served by a woman who will win you over before you even try her oxtails.

New York's Malaysian community has been well-represented by this Elmhurst mainstay for more than three decades. In the small space—seemingly untouched since they opened—you’ll sit perched on a wooden bench, elbow-to-elbow during the dinner rush, eating creamy coconut laksa, or sizzling bean curd, or Hainanese chicken, or anything else that calls to you from the wall of food photos. Follow your heart, and know they more than deliver on the promise of their name. It’s all going to Taste Amazing.

We could insist you visit Cocina Consuelo solely for their lunch-time masa pancake—a thick, honey-drenched disc that’s almost corn pudding—or for the perfectly spiced birria, served in marrow-filled bones at dinner. But the exceptional menu isn’t what makes this seven-table Hamilton Heights restaurant truly special. Anything could happen here: you might hear a strumming guitarist who also whistles, or a random diner banging out a few classics on the warbly piano.

There’s always a line inside Trinciti (and sometimes outside too), crowded with people who come to the South Ozone Park spot regularly. They're here for doubles laden with bouncy shrimp and soft, thick channa, or an overstuffed bake and shark sandwich, or infant-sized goat roti, with a heap of goat curry that will stain your fingertips yellow for at least three days. Expect to exit in about 20 minutes—currant roll in one hand, and a five-pound bag of NYC's best Trinidadian food in the other.

Penny entered the small plates scene fully formed, but don’t call just it another wine bar (though they do have exactly 1,000 bottles on their full list). The seafood at this East Village restaurant is exceptional—from the moment we tasted the sweet, red Argentine shrimp in their signature Ice Box, we were on board. The menu is short, but full of delightful surprises, like plump oysters hiding under a cap of puff pastry, or an ice cream sandwich that actually looks like miniature sandwich.

Ha’s Snack Bar on the Lower East Side is so small, and so crowded, that you could easily topple someone's pinot gris as you pass through the billowing front curtain. The number of diners crammed inside, eagerly knocking elbows, is a testament to the punchy flavors coming out of Ha’s tiny kitchen at the back. Virtually everything is electrified with fish sauce, like sizzling snails in tamarind butter, or a kumquat-crowned black pudding tartlet.

Living in NYC is expensive, and sometimes exhausting. When you need a reminder of why you love it anyway, head to Kashkar Cafe. Steps from the ocean in Brighton Beach, this Uyghur-Uzbek restaurant serves life-affirming, lamb-centric food, in a space that feels like a refuge. Even the fluorescent lighting is oddly comforting. Eat some reassuringly soft hand-pulled noodles, fried to the slightest char, a plate of petite dumplings in a fat-accented broth that could probably cure the plague.

Those who don’t eat pork, avert your eyes. Every edible surface at this East Village taqueria is covered in a thin slick of pork lard—and that’s exactly why we love it. From the same team as Taqueria Ramirez (which we also love), this counter-service spot serves every part of the pig, from trompa to rabo. The surtida taco, which includes all the cuts combined on a freshly griddled corn tortilla, is mandatory.

Lucali serves the best pizza in the city. Their crust is thin, crispy, and just a little bit chewy, and it maintains immaculate posture while supporting velvety tomato sauce and three types of cheese. This is simple pizza made exceedingly well, and it’s greater than the sum of its parts. (The fresh basil is key.) The mammoth ricotta-stuffed calzone, which is the only other item on the menu, also happens to be just as essential as the pies.

The Fujianese, cash-only Shu Jiao Fu Zhou has a gravitational pull that attracts tourists, locals, and anyone looking for an experience so pure it feels like a pilgrimage. At the revered Chinatown spot, the floors are industrial sheet metal, the tables are communal, and the pork dumplings with chewy, vivid chives are smooth as silk and bursting with flavor. Get six for $3 or 12 for $4.50, and add some soup with wispy, delicate wontons or a plate of the elegantly plain and creamy peanut noodles.

This restaurant serves South Indian regional specialties typically made in rural home settings, and they do so in a narrow space with quintessential West Village charm. Highlights include a crispy uttappam filled with seasonal root vegetables, crunchy Mangalorean cauliflower, and a masala-potato-filled gunpowder dosa that tastes like cheese even though there’s none present. No meal at Semma would be quite right, however, without a few of the meaty dishes that are harder to find in NYC.

Smithereens calls itself a New England-inspired seafood restaurant, and true to theme, you’ll find a lobster roll, a cocktail called the Ben Affleck, and Narragansett Lagers here. The dainty, thoughtful, fish-forward plates change frequently, but their three regulars should always be on your table: a honey butter-slathered buckwheat pancake draped over a mound of smoked bluefish, that sauced-to-order lobster roll, and a dish called simply “Beans.”

A single bite of the salteña and you know there’s sorcery going on behind this walk-up window in Sunnyside. Bolivian Llama Party’s signature dish is what might happen if an empanada and a soup dumpling listened to a Marvin Gaye album together: a steaming hot, tender, egg-yellow pastry brimming with rich chicken or beef stew. But the rest of the menu is full of sleeper hits. The diablada broster, dusted with purple locoto chile powder, is one of our favorite spicy chicken sandwiches.

Cervo’s is an extremely reliable restaurant. But not in a boring way. In a sexy way. At this Spanish seafood restaurant on the Lower East Side (from the same team as Hart's, The Fly and Eel Bar), you can eat a plate of clams swimming in garlicky white wine, and know that they taste this excellent every single night. So reliable. So sexy. As long as you reserve a week in advance, or snag a walk-in table on the earlier side, you can eat those garlicky bivalves whenever you want.

Lines are the worst, and no matter how good that sandwich, donut, or croissant spin-off is, we’ll hardly ever tell you to wait in one. Lechonera La Piraña is the exception. Inside this South Bronx trailer propped up on cinderblocks, a single chef hacks at the city’s finest roast pork with an arm-length machete. The skin shatters like peanut brittle, and the fat coats your lips. To get your own takeout container full of the stuff, you’re going to have to wait—at least an hour, and probably more.

Eating at Szechuan Mountain House is an all-around thrilling experience. The chaos of St. Marks travels right up to the restaurant, where servers zip around with headsets, delivering dishes with hit after adrenaline hit of electrifying flavor. The combination of numbing peppercorns and spicy chilies can be found all over their menu, for example in their mouth-vibrating ma-po tofu and fried la-zi chicken.