Jean’s has clubstaurant coursing through its veins. There's one big difference, though—the food at this palatial, two-floor restaurant in Noho is actually good. Upstairs, they serve produce from their very own farm, and downstairs, there’s a disco ball in a dark red room that once hosted Snoop Dogg and regularly hosts amateur East Village-based DJs. Eat a juicy burger next to someone who has 129k followers and wears sunglasses indoors.

Don’t spend half your meal trying to figure out what to order and how to split your check. Go to Kisa, a walk-in-only retro Korean diner on the Lower East Side where you choose from four combo sets, all of which cost $32 and come with soup, rice, and a buffet of bottomless sides. The bulgogi is slightly sweet and sliced into ribbons, and the spicy pork, with its crispy charred bits, is even better. Enjoy it alongside some kimchi and mung bean jelly in the packed room.

If you need excessive amounts of fun but just have about an hour, book a counter spot for the $99 omakase at Sushi on Me in Jackson Heights. With a disco ball on the ceiling, a Radiohead poster, and a neon sign that says “Enjoy Your F*cking Dinner,” this speakeasy-ish spot leans into slacker cool. But it’s actually a highly choreographed performance, from the “Hooked on a Feeling” ooga chuggas that drop as you slurp your first oyster, to the “smoked” salmon that you’ll half-inhale.

Sappe, a Thai restaurant from the Soothr team, makes a regular evening feel like a movie premiere. You’ll pass under a bright yellow theater marquee, and, once you take your seat and see the mirror on the ceiling above you, realize it’s not Nicole Kidman up on that giant silver expanse: it’s you and your besties crushing some cocktails. The neon writing on the walls is perfect lighting for your glam shot, and the drinks are not only potent, they’re also inspired by famous women from Thai films.

If you show up to Bernie’s at 5:30pm on a weeknight (when it usually doesn’t have a line, by the way), you’ll probably see at least one Williamsburg-born five-year-old celebrating their birthday with an ice cream sundae. And even at 8pm, when that kid is almost certainly asleep and dreaming of ice cream, there are still sundaes on every checkered tablecloth at this spot on the edge of McCarren Park.

In the short but extremely well-documented evolution of Dimes Square, there are the newcomers (Casino, Le Dive) and the classics (Dimes, Kiki’s). And long after people have moved on to create a new “microneighborhood” elsewhere, Kiki’s will still be here: the perfect fried cheese and tzatziki-eating destination before a night out on the Lower East Side. This Greek spot is cavernous, just the right level of loud, and it upholds the age-old tradition of serving house wine.

Tatiana at Lincoln Center is an Afro-Caribbean love letter to New York City, and one of our top-rated restaurants. It’s almost impossible to get a table, but once you do, you’ll feel like you’ve gained access to the city’s hottest club, circa 1999. Chain-link curtains and tiles that look like asphalt oil slicks echo the throwback hip hop and R&B playlist, and you’ll have fun trying to talk over the music to dissect all the menu’s references too.

An interactive dinner situation like hot pot tends to be a shoe-in for a good time with a group. But what if your sauce bar was also next to an old timey water mill, or you ate your spicy tripe in a grass hut? Decked out like a rural Chinese village, Chong Qing Lao Zao is the Disneyland of Flushing’s hot pot restaurants, with hidden alleyways, mock Maoist propaganda, and even fake chickens. Despite being three-stories, this place stays packed, and there’s always a wait.

At Enzo’s, nobody will give you a dirty look if you drunk-laugh too loudly. This old school Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue is for big groups who want to consume a boatload of wine and argue over which pasta shapes to order. (The answer is bucatini alla carbonara and cavatelli with broccoli rabe.) With four big dining rooms, the place always feels packed but always has room, and you can still hear uptempo Sinatra numbers over the noise. Go ahead, get another bottle.

In the world of East Village restaurants, Superiority Burger is what we’d call a “chaotic good” character. The walls are covered in photos of everything from Taki 183’s graffiti to Dock Ellis' acid-fueled no-hitter. In the bathroom, audio clips switch every 15 seconds from old commercials to episodes of The Dating Game. There is a real soda fountain. They also make vegan burgers and space-age desserts, and have a fan club that borders on cultish.

If you want dinner to feel like an activity but you don’t want to go to one of those places where you paint while you eat because you’re afraid that your art won’t be appreciated in your lifetime, go to Astoria Seafood. Part fish market, part restaurant, this place is an interactive experience where you choose your food from a seafood display then tell the kitchen how you’d like it cooked. Want exactly eight grilled shrimp, three squid, and one fried snapper? Not a problem. Don’t forget to BYOB.

There’s a good chance you’ll end up on the dance floor at some point during your night at Miss Lily’s 7A. You might be sitting at a booth in the colorful East Village Caribbean spot eating jerk chicken and curry goat, or standing next to your table drinking piña coladas when the dancehall and rockers blasting through the speakers finally inspire you to join everyone under the disco ball. Before fully committing, we recommend getting one more order of cod fish fritters.

As the big marquee inside Potluck Club proudly states, you're “here for a good time, not a long time.” From the moment you enter, you know there’s something different happening here. Is it a bar, a lounge, a restaurant, the concessions section of an imaginary movie theater? This place is large, pleasantly noisy, and serves food that’s a nostalgic love letter to Chinatown, like fried chicken with scallion biscuits and chili crisp jam.

The Southern food—like fried chicken and cornbread—at Red Rooster is good. But that’s not why you come here. You come to Red Rooster because few other NYC restaurants feel as alive as this one. The bar area is always mobbed, the DJ spins funk and soul tunes, and people generally appear to be having a blast. On a warm evening, try and get a seat outside. That stretch of Malcolm X Blvd. is basically a block party every weekend.

At most fun restaurants, it’s booze or music that amp up the party atmosphere. At Shukette in Chelsea, it’s bread. The star of the “Rip This” section of this Middle Eastern restaurant’s menu is the frena, coming in hot from the oven at the center of an open kitchen. But all the other breads are great too, and dipping them into a variety of tangy dips with a couple of friends is a guaranteed good time.

Well, we’re just going to get really honest here for a moment: we went to Xi Yue Seafood Hot Pot for a team dinner, we mixed tequila from a nearby liquor store with grape soda (you can BYOB for a fee of $30), we dunked every type of seafood, and meat, imaginable into bubbling spicy broth, and then we all sang a questionable rendition of JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late.” If this sounds fun to you—and we don’t blame you if it doesn’t—make a plan to come to this bi-level restaurant in Sunset Park.

Port Sa’id feels like a party, but not the kind that you want to leave after five minutes. The Hudson Square restaurant is big enough to house a private jet, and it’s filled with tables covered in brown butcher paper, with a DJ in the back flanked by speakers the size of industrial refrigerators. On the menu, you’ll find a bunch of vegetable-forward Israeli dishes like a baked potato, schug-topped hummus, and a salad with olive oil-soaked chunks of bread, most of which cost less than $20.