George Motz, possibly our greatest scholar of hamburgers, is the owner of this retro fantasia. There are just two burgers on the menu: the Classic Smash and the signature George Motz’s Fried Onion Burger. The Classic Smash is fantastic, strong and correct. You don’t need to know the history of burgers to be taken with its honest flavors, its modest size, its firm handshake of pickle and onion and good ol’ American ground beef.

Oti has existed, in one form or another, for years. Elyas Popa, its Romanian-born proprietor and chef, ran it as a catering business, then as a series of pop-ups and residencies. In September, 2023, Oti became a proper restaurant, serving Popa’s riffs on the food of his childhood, bringing together a collision of Balkan, Ottoman, and Mediterranean influences: soft cheeses, spiced meats, fresh green herbs, a vivid tradition of pickling and curing.

At her new venture, the chef Angie Mar combines a downtown vibe with vivacity and drama. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients such as truffle and foie gras. At times, it can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—but, when it works, it works.

Few people in N.Y.C. understand pasta the way the chef Missy Robbins understands pasta. Misipasta, her latest venture, is a market as much as a restaurant; there are about 20 seats indoors. Despite the dozen or so shapes of pasta available in the to-go case, Misipasta offers only two pastas on the dine-in menu, but two is enough.

At Café Carmellini, where meals are chock-full of delightful flourishes, the breadsticks are one of the most irresistible: a vaseful of grissini, pencil-thin and two feet long. Café Carmellini is a serious, sophisticated, upscale restaurant. The elegant menu matches the room; the precise and attentive service matches the menu. But—as the frankly silly breadsticks foreshadowed—the pomp of the place never lapses into tedium.

If you’re in the mood for beach, you might head to this walk-in-only restaurant, where the chef Cosme Aguilar is serving exquisite Mexican seafood dishes, potent cocktails, and upscale chill vibes. Aguilar and his brother, Luis, who grew up in Chiapas, made their name with the city’s first Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant, Casa Enrique. At Quique, Aguilar brings some of those dishes to Manhattan while turning up the heat, the elegance, the artfulness.

There is nothing dutiful or diminished about the menu at the vegan Caribbean restaurant HAAM, which is short for “healthy as a motha.” The “motha” in question is the restaurant’s chef-owner, Yesenia Ramdass, a mom of three from Washington Heights who got into veganism as a teen. At HAAM—though the name is pronounced like the meat—she devotes herself to re-creating plant-based versions of both Dominican favorites and dishes from her husband’s native Trinidad.

The signature dish here is the cold Himokawa udon. Served in a ceramic ring bowl, the noodles are beguilingly wide Möbius strips of silk: sleek, slippery, and impervious to even the most patient engagement with chopsticks. We recommend taking a bite with the readily supplied tongs before dunking it in the dipping sauce, not because the sauce isn’t good but because the diaphanous, bouncy streamers of wheat are best slurped without distraction.

Fidel Caballero, the chef-owner of Corima, grew up between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez. He builds his menu on a foundation of Northern Mexican ingredients—green chilis, plenty of cheese—but pulls in other elements: a bit of France, a bit of China, a whole heck of a lot of Japan. Corima’s menu is laced with uncommon Mexican ingredients such as chintixtle, a Oaxacan paste made from dried chilis and shrimp, and chicatanas, crisp flying ants that taste like salt and smoke.

Named somewhat unimaginatively after the building’s address, this joint is operated by the mega-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The kitchen is overseen by Jonathan Benno, a blue-chip chef who for a long time was the culinary No. 1 at Per Se. The bar menu is an album of the Jean-Georges restaurant group’s greatest hits; the dining room’s offerings are appropriately pitched to anticipate the desires of a clientele that wants to be pleased but not challenged.

Penny, a stylish seafood bar in the East Village, is situated just upstairs from Claud, its sister restaurant, a slinky little bistro that’s been a hit since its opening, in 2022. Where Claud is warm and sexy, Penny is slick and sharp, all white and steel and marble. But the mood is welcoming and casual and the food–like the glittering array of seafood in the Ice Box Plus–makes money feel well spent.

At Lola’s, the chef-owner Suzanne Cupps privileges subtlety over intensity. The menu features no TikTok bait, no superficial trickery. At a glance, the food might seem to verge on ho-hum. But it takes considerable skill to make an unshowy meal that still grabs a diner’s attention. An alumna of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, Cupps favors a pantry that is both global and placeless, with a motif of Southern flavors informed by her childhood in South Carolina.

At Sawa, the chef Soroosh Golbabae, (formerly of the exceptional Persian restaurants Sofreh and Eyval) interprets traditional Lebanese fare in ways that feel assertive and fresh. The room is casual but the food has a grandness to it, a thoughtful formality, that makes a meal at Sawa feel like something of a special occasion. Linger over a piece of semolina cake perfumed with orange blossoms or spoon up the dregs of a bowl of layali lubnan, semolina milk pudding.

Kisa is an homage to South Korea’s “drivers’ restaurants” (kisa sikdang), establishments whose limited menus, speedy service, and affordable prices are tuned to the needs of cabbies on the go. Kisa offers baekban (home-style) set meals, featuring an entrée with rice, soup, and an array of banchan. The food, overseen by the chef Simon Lee, is simply terrific, and the bare-bones, worn-in space does an astonishingly good job of seeming like it’s been there forever.

A meal at the Boathouse these days is considerably more satisfying than one at a tourist-bait canteen has any right to be. The kitchen seems to be embracing the dreamy, Upper West Side-y, tweed-and-loafers Nora Ephron of it all, with a menu evocative of a Reagan-era (but Dukakis-voting) luncheon party: stuffed mushrooms with Ritz-cracker crumbs, oysters Rockefeller, fries with Russian dressing. The tables set against the terrace rail under the green-and-white striped awnings are the best.

Clover Hill is a tiny, tin-ceilinged tasting-menu restaurant with a Michelin star on an impossibly charming cobblestoned Brooklyn block. The menu has the subtlety and precision of any Manhattan-billionaire canteen, and the price tag–$305 per person–would fit in over there as well. But there is little pomp in a meal here, no running narrative put forth about “Chef” and his thoughts and dreams. The restaurant trades in an opulence of intimacy rather than of power.

Strange Delight is the latest in a small crew of excellent Cajun and Creole joints that have opened in the city in recent years. But none has evoked the city of inspiration quite so subtly and studiously. Smartly, the menu’s culinary homages—charbroiled oysters, fried-seafood sandwiches, oysters Rockefeller—are more riffs than facsimiles. The menu is, overwhelmingly, dedicated to the fruits of the sea, but there’s still plenty to choose from, and it’s hard to go wrong.

Nearly 90 years since first opening in 1937, Le Veau d’Or is the city’s oldest surviving French restaurant, and the only one of its original cohort that remains. Despite being recently facelifted, it remains anachronistic, obsessed with its own history. Even the format of the meal is proudly archaic: as in the past, it’s a prix fixe that, for $125, encompasses your choice of an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert, with a salad course of lettuces vinaigrette that arrives after the main course.

Blue Hour has the fluorescent freneticism of a late-night stoner takeout spot, which is pretty much what it is. The wall-size, backlit, all-photographic menu reads like a fast-food greatest-hits album: a smashburger, a chopped cheese, a Cwunch Wap Supweme. The food is made with high-quality ingredients and a considerable amount of care. The star of the show is the Cwunch Wap Supweme: It’s a familiar shape, but the flavors are far more nuanced than those of its mega-chain counterpart.

This new outpost is one of some 165 Din Tai Fungs, the overwhelming majority of which are in Asia. The gargantuan restaurant is more than 25,000 square feet in size. The kitchen can produce more than 10,000 dumplings a day; the xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, are assembled by hand and must weigh 21 grams, with each wrapper bearing no fewer than 18 folds. The restaurant’s specialty is the xiao long bao, whose delicate, whorled wrappers hold rich morsels of meat and a splash of savory broth.

The restaurant belongs to the chef Dennis Spina. Spina’s menu evokes both a relaxed English modernism and the earnest global-pantry bohemia of potluck night in the comp-lit department. It’s a pleasure to encounter an utterly self-assured, highly personal point of view on the menu. A visit to Cafe Kestrel gives a diner the tactile sense that the food was cooked by a person who had big, bewitching ideas about dinner and how to serve it.

At this restaurant inside the Bowery Market, breakfast ramen is the only thing on the menu, served from 10 A.M. through a very un-breakfast-like 7 P.M. The flavors tell a story of morning in New York: there’s a bacon-egg-and-cheese ramen, a steak-and-eggs ramen, two bowls inspired by bagels, and another, brunchy version inspired by a B.L.T. All five varieties of ramen use the same noodles and all begin with the same foundational broth, made with chicken stock and dashi.

Cocina Consuelo comprises 400 square feet jam-packed with color and life. The restaurant is the joint project of the chef Karina Garcia and her husband, Lalo Rodriguez. By day, there’s excellent coffee and a brief and serious menu. In the evening, the communal coffee-shop energy transmutes into something a little sexier. The dinner dishes, with their elegant plating and sophisticated flavors, wouldn’t feel out of place at a ritzy downtown dining room, but they fit in just as seamlessly here.

Sendo bills itself as a “Tokyo-style” sushi-ya, which means that a meal there is agile and inexpensive. The restaurant offers three omakase options, the priciest of which costs just $47 and includes 10 pieces of nigiri, two hand rolls, and a bowl of fish over rice. There are also prix-fixe sets of hand rolls, topping out at $35 dollars. Dinner might run as little as 30 minutes, but, with a few glasses of sake and an à-la-carte add-on, you could certainly stretch things out to a leisurely 45.

Bridges has quickly established itself as a restaurant for the thinking cool person. The chef Sam Lawrence cooks in a mode that we might call the gastronomic version of quiet luxury; his opulent food, plated austerely, is the dinner-plate equivalent of a cashmere ball cap or a vicuña coat. It is rich, rich, rich, though the flavors tend toward subtlety rather than brute force, with everything on the menu seemingly kissed by smoke and silk.

Clemente Bar, a lounge opened by the Swiss chef Daniel Humm above his famed restaurant Eleven Madison Park, offers refined plant-based bites and beverages. Here, patrons can drop in for a drink and a snack, and invest $100 into a renowned chef’s artistic vision rather than $1,000. Upstairs, as downstairs, Humm is a master of the exquisite plate, but the bar’s high-low concept feels more snobbish than playful.

Andrew Tarlow helped reimagine Brooklyn’s cultural identity. After opening Diner in Williamsburg, his business grew into a bit of an empire, with more restaurants, plus a butcher shop, a bakery, and more, all in Brooklyn. Now, Tarlow has opened Borgo in Manhattan. The menu is very grown up—fundamentally Italian, as much of the cooking in his universe is, and built around a live-fire oven that crackles in the open kitchen, which fills the front section of one of the restaurant’s two rooms.