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“The goal was always to have a restaurant in the Fillmore,” Fernay McPherson says. During six years cooking soul food in an Emeryville, California, food hall, the chef’s sights were set on returning to the historic San Francisco neighborhood three generations of her family have called home. After searching for months, a storefront became available on Fillmore Street. “When I walked into the space, it just felt like I finally made it home,” McPherson says. Some diners who show up for squares of brown butter cornbread and Friday-only fried fish have known the chef since she walked this street on her way to school. Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement, one of this year’s Best New Restaurants, fits into its neighborhood like a missing puzzle piece.
Jhonny Reyes was compelled by a similar pull toward home when he opened Lenox in Seattle. In a restaurant decorated with Puerto Rican coqui frogs and tropical plants, the chef transforms the bounty of the Pacific Northwest into dishes tracing his family’s path from San Juan to New York City to Seattle, where Reyes grew up. His crackling and shreddy lechon luxuriates in broth-soaked mustard greens from a nearby farm. “This is me gathering my roots back,” Reyes says, “and trying to reignite the spark that is my culture.” Lenox is the chef’s expression of his connection to this city, a unique melding of influences and ingredients that sings in his hands.
This year’s most ambitious chefs laid themselves bare, their autobiographical storytelling shaping singular restaurants. You’ll feel it at Vinai, where chef Yia Vang imbues his menu with tributes to Hmong culture and tells of his family’s journey from a Thai refugee camp to Minneapolis. And at Avize, an Alpine restaurant in Atlanta that seems purely European until you get to the frog legs tossed in Atlanta’s very own lemon pepper seasoning. It’s an ode to two places, a chef’s way of sharing a story only they can.
An indelible sense of time and place defines the Best New Restaurants of 2025. This list is unranked because each restaurant is worth a visit for its own reason. A meal you won’t experience anywhere else. —Elazar Sontag, restaurant editor
This list includes restaurants that opened between March 2024 and March 2025.
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BAAN MAE
Photographs by Jared Soares
Seng Luangrath is heralded as the godmother of America’s Lao food movement. But 15 years ago, when she took over a Thai restaurant in Seven Corners, Virginia, and quietly added Lao dishes to the menu, many were still unfamiliar with the cuisine. Four restaurants later, Baan Mae is her most personal and creative, an expression of all she has done to educate and entice diners. With a newfound sense of freedom and playfulness, she serves traditional dishes like sakoo, sticky tapioca dumplings stuffed with fermented radish, alongside cheeky entrants to the Lao canon like her Fi’Lao O’Fish, a fried fish sandwich dolloped with chili paste and pillowy whipped tofu mayonnaise. At Baan Mae, Luangrath goes beyond the borders of her home country, serving dishes native to Malaysia, Burma, and Cambodia, and ones she’s dreamed up on a whim. As cheery servers describe their favorite dishes, they make no distinction between the traditional and newly imagined. This is simply Luangrath’s world, full of possibility. —Elazar Sontag
DŌGON
Photographs by Isa Zapata
As word spread that Kwame Onwuachi was opening a restaurant in DC’s stately Salamander Hotel, the city started buzzing. This was a homecoming for the megawatt chef, a return to the city where he opened his first restaurant nearly a decade ago. Dōgon is alluringly dim and powered by an army of attentive servers. The restaurant shares some DNA with Tatiana, the much-hyped New York restaurant Onwuachi opened in 2022, with its bumping music and wide-ranging references to the African diaspora. As Tatiana is so distinctly of New York, with dishes inspired by the boroughs, Dōgon is all in on DC. Chunks of Wagyu beef short rib served with smoky awaze sauce and a crumbly cheese called ayib speak to the city’s Ethiopian community, the largest in America. A dish of shredded deep-fried lamb surrounded by velvety curried chickpeas is a tribute to Ben Ali, the Trinidadian restaurateur who opened the DC chili dog staple Ben’s Chili Bowl. This is Onwuachi’s loving embrace of the dining community that first saw his potential. —Elazar Sontag
Photographs by Adam Milliron
On a Monday night in Pittsburgh’s Little Italy, diners sidle up to Fet-Fisk’s horseshoe bar—from old-timers stopping in for a bottle of Iron City to Gen Z’ers with jellyfish haircuts sipping on house-made marigold schnapps. The contrasts are part of what defines Sarah LaPonte and chef Nik Forsberg’s daring Nordic-ish restaurant, where anyone can find their niche. Devour the kicky pickled mackerel nestled in a gully of shaved cabbage and smoky beets beneath moody red lamplight while sitting barside, or let your meal unfold in the rustic dining room bright enough to admire the whole branzino’s craggy breadcrumb crust, a generous goblet of dulse butter at its side. Each element of Forsberg’s free-swinging menu (fresh farmer’s cheese, caraway-salt-cured gravlax, botanicals-infused aquavit) takes days to create via processes he honed during years of sold-out pop-ups. There’s an ease to Fet-Fisk, and the newcomer already feels like an institution, seamlessly reanimating a 50-year-old Italian joint, wood-paneled walls and all. —Jennifer Hope Choi
HA’S SNACK BAR
Photographs by Evelyn Freja
Have you spent 15 minutes in Manhattan lately? Did someone mention Ha’s Snack Bar in a hushed tone? Did they tell you, smugly, that they lined up at 4:30 p.m. for their spot? Everyone in New York City wants to keep this restaurant to themselves, but self-control doesn’t come easy. Couple Anthony Ha and Sadie-Mae Burns first drew fans for their creative Vietnamese French cooking through pop-ups at buzzy restaurants as far afield as Paris. At their shoebox of a Lower East Side wine bar, mostly counter seats and an open kitchen equipped with induction burners, you order from a scribbled chalkboard menu that changes each night. Wonderfully springy snails arrive in a translucent pool of tamarind butter; sweet chili sauce surrounds a wedge of Spanish tortilla studded with nubbins of lap cheong and big flakes of crab; and when it’s available, the vol-au-vent, a sizable tower of puff pastry filled with curried lobster and plush sweetbreads, is as majestic as it is decadent. The menu isn’t posted online. There is no phone number. No website, for that matter. Online reservations disappear as quickly as they’re released. Yet everyone seems to find their way to Ha’s Snack Bar. —Elazar Sontag
PROVENANCE
Photograph by Bre Furlong
A matte red cylinder, smaller than a baby carrot. Immediately legible to the tongue as raw, lean tuna. That delicate, metallic tang—almost more sensation than flavor, the suggestion of electricity, like looking at an outlet with a fork in your hand. But then the fish gives way and a smidgen of foie gras stashed inside makes your eyes pop. Iron. Earth. Fat. A flicker of brûléed blood orange whispers of sunshine. Open your eyes again and realize there’s more. A single sparkling oyster goosed with kimchi liquor and black truffle. Wobbly uni alongside an equally wobbly consommé jelly. Each bite arresting time for a moment, three of more than 20 exacting courses served each night as a part of chef Nich Bazik’s two-and-a-half-hour tasting menu. Stopping time is Bazik’s superpower. Compelling diners to pause comes naturally, perhaps because this parade of beautiful moments was such a long time coming. Two years painstakingly transforming a 200-year-old Philadelphia row house into the restaurant equivalent of a Formula 1 car; nearly 20 more honing his skills in kitchens across the city, learning, sharpening, waiting. One could think of the food at Provenance as fundamentally French, or subtly Korean, but more than a single cuisine or tradition, it tastes of a chef’s profound patience. —Amiel Stanek
Photographs by Jared Soares
Millie Powell and Will Mester didn’t want The Wren to be a restaurant. It was intended, emphatically, to be a pub. The kind of public living room, knitted into the social fabric of Powell’s native Dublin, that so bewitched Mester during their transatlantic courtship. A venue for confidantes and coconspirators and all manner of close ones to sit shoulder to shoulder. Problem is, when you serve food this good, people are going to treat your pub like a restaurant, even if you do away with reservations and table service. In any case, The Wren, which Mester co-owns with Rosemary Liss, is most glorious when taken as prescribed. Belly up to the bar with a friend. Have a few rounds of Guinness pulled with pride, maybe a scotch sour. Get a little hungry. Mester will slide down to his tiny kitchen at one end of the bar and cook you something from a chalkboard menu freshly scrawled each morning. A country-style omelet, cheetah-spotted with brown butter and oozing Lancashire cheese. Terrazzo slabs of terrine with good brown bread and a hillock of cornichons. Or, if you’ve a bit more appetite, perhaps a whole roast pigeon, split head and all, resting on a pile of jus-swaddled peas. Rustic, transportive food that makes you grateful to be exactly where you are, with a friend in your ear and a fresh pint on its way. —Amiel Stanek
ACAMAYA
Photographs by Daymon Gardner
Tourists go to New Orleans for beignets, for gumbo, for succulent little crawfish slurped down in one bite. There’s good Mexican food here, but mostly they don’t seek it out. That is, until last year, when sisters Ana and Lydia Castro opened Acamaya. The restaurant bills itself as coastal Mexican, Ana channeling each day’s catch into some of the most compelling and creative cooking you’ll find in this city of superlative seafood. During crawfish season, she wraps the tender morsels into torpedoes of caramelized cheese and nestles them in pliable flour tortillas. She serves masa dumplings shaped like thumbprint cookies with crabmeat from Jean Lafitte, a fishing village 30 minutes from the city. Dim lighting bounces off of soft pink tiles and warms the dining room, the bathrooms glow ocean blue, every inch of the space colored by the sisters’ sunny dispositions and their dedication to turning even the most low-key midweek dinner into an exercise in jubilant excess. For $90, a platter will hit your table ladened with a tin of caviar, six golden gorditas each the size of a blini, and puréed ayocote beans for dolloping. You won’t find this dish on any other coastline, so go ahead and splurge. —Elazar Sontag
AVIZE
Photograph by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Atlanta has precisely one chef who specializes in Alpine fine dining. Yet Karl Gorline isn’t an outlier; he fits into a long tradition of Atlanta chefs expanding upon Southern food by leaning into their heritage. At Avize, Gorline brings brash creativity and a deep love of the South. The restaurant is a shining example of the city’s boundless evolution. Lemon pepper frog legs, mildly preposterous on paper, make perfect sense when they hit the tongue—tender and vibrant, tossed in butter charged with the city’s signature spice blend. Venison tartare is flecked with buckwheat and walnuts and peppered with bright herbs, hearty mushrooms, and shaved pickled radish. Fermented carrots and miso cast dry-aged duck in a new light, and a final bite of white pepper ice cream is amplified with fig leaf oil and airy oolong tea foam. The maximalist space is anchored by a towering stuffed mountain goat, and the vibe is set by a retro playlist of hip-hop. The Alps are right here, encased in a restaurant that couldn’t be more Atlanta. —Pervaiz Shallwani
Photographs by Lexi Parra
Aaron Bludorn has harnessed Houston’s culinary specificity to create a menu you won’t find at another hotel in America. His restaurant sits in the courtyard of the Hotel Saint Augustine, an airy, modernist space brimming with sagebrush. Bludorn, who spent a decade in New York working at Café Boulud, cleverly disperses Creole and Vietnamese influences throughout his French-inflected menu as nods to the communities that shaped Houston into one of America’s great food cities. For breakfast and lunch, there’s Gulf shrimp in a moat of creamy grits and massive triangles of quiche suspending earthy layers of collard greens. As the sun sets, diners dig into burgers dressed up like banh mi, with pickled daikon, rich duck liver mousse, and a burst of cilantro. Sausage made from Gulf Coast crawfish is served in spicy Creole sauce, a piquant tomato-based mother sauce that intensifies the seafood’s subtle sweetness. What might be a cacophony of notes in less skilled hands blends into a delicious harmony as dinner unfolds. —Sam Stone
RECOVECO
Photographs by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
In a city rich with tropical fruits and rainbow-scaled fish, Recoveco unearths less obvious treasures. Ballyhoo, a fish common in the Florida Keys and typically treated as bait, is bathed in a punchy white soy ponzu. It’s a work of art—and the October issue’s cover star—the body parceled into 12 uniform pieces, the needle-like nose jutting dramatically off of the plate. In a spare dining room with concrete ceilings and spindly pendant lights, chef-owners Maria Teresa Gallina and Nicolas Martinez serve only what excites them most. The pits of the custardy fruit called mamey sapote are saved from the compost bin, shaved and infused into an almond-like syrup they pour over fudgy wedges of chocolate cake scattered with pearls of finger lime. Restrained plating accentuates the kaleidoscopic color and surprising flavor of each dish. Sapodilla, a pear-like fruit that looks like a coconut, adds a malty butterscotch intensity to a sticky toffee pudding. Every bite elicits wonder, provoking a quiet moment of gratitude for this lush, miraculous habitat. —Kate Kassin
FELD
Photographs by Evan Jenkins
Jake Potashnick’s résumé reads like a fine dining bucket list, with stints in the highest caliber kitchens of Japan, Sweden, and Germany. To open Feld, the chef returned to his native Chicago. Potashnick and crew focus on dishes that showcase the intimate relationships they’ve built with farmers of the finest asparagus, duck, Asian pear—you name it. Early on, Feld became Chicago’s most divisive restaurant, a flash point for critics of highfalutin many-course tasting menus. Potashnick took skepticism as an invitation to share his process, bringing his roughly 100,000 TikTok followers behind the scenes and on frequent farm trips, offering a glimpse of his team’s meticulous operation. His tasting menu features dishes like a dice-size cube of turnip floating in a sublime dashi infused with Benton ham; cherry-seared hand-dived scallops in rich sherry butter; and bagna cauda made with mussels. All are the result of months of conversations, farm trips, and handshakes with producers. Dinner at Feld feels like a night of theater, with 20-plus courses unfurling over two hours, a dynamic dinner-in-the-round that is as engaging as it is earnest. —Joseph Hernandez
Photographs by Graham Tolbert
For Yia Vang, every meal is a chance to tell the story of family. In a dining room decorated with geometric hanging lamps and exposed wood beams, portraits of the chef’s parents fill open shelves. You’ll meet them again in the form of scorching Mama Vang’s hot sauce, produced on their farm 30 minutes from Vinai. They also provide the restaurant with mustard greens, slender eggplants, and chile varieties that electrify dishes shaped by the chapters of Vang’s life. Deviled eggs with Thai basil sambal and crisp shrimp are pulled from a memory of visits to his paternal grandmother in western Wisconsin, always leaving with hard-boiled eggs, a Hmong symbol of life. A tin of confit mackerel served alongside a ball of purple sticky rice calls back to an after-school snack of 33-cent sardine cans from the Asian market, to which Vang would add hot sauce, cilantro, and lime. In the 1988 New Fashioned, a whiskey cocktail named for the year Vang’s family immigrated to the United States from the Thai refugee camp Ban Vinai, a stately ice cube is engraved with a geometric symbol evoking traditional Hmong embroidery. Throughout a history racked with persecution and forced migration, hidden symbols became a means of preserving Hmong culture. At Vinai, Vang offers them up for all to see. —Kate Kassin
WILDWEED
Photographs by Hatsue
Dinner at Cincinnati’s Wildweed is a snapshot of a Midwest few know as well as David Jackman. His menu reflects the farm he supports and the forests he scours for native mushrooms, berries, and herbs. Take a bowl of gramigna noodles tangled with braised lamb ragù, laced with sorghum molasses vinegar, and topped with sheep’s-milk cheese and fennel pollen. The rye flour is milled from Kentucky-grown grain. The lamb is delivered whole, broken down by Jackman, then salted, smoked, and braised. The vinegar is made by a passionate duo who process obscure small-batch crops at the peak of their season. Another pasta, striped like a candy cane, is filled with chicken from a farm at the city’s edge and strewn with local lemon balm, shiso, and cilantro. Everything Jackman cooks is an invitation to see this region in its most delicious light. A tasting menu at the kitchen counter spotlights precious ingredients that stick around for just days or weeks. To the last bite of a semifreddo ice cream sandwich made with pawpaws foraged during their late-summer window, Wildweed offers loving tribute to the heartland. —Kate Kassin
CAMÉLIA
Photographs by Michelle Groskopf
Before opening Camélia, Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba flew to Paris and Tokyo, where they pieced together the vision for a bistro that would marry the two cultures. Their Arts District restaurant has redbrick floors from its days as a Nabisco factory, warmed up with globe lights and dark leather booths. Chopsticks nest on linen napkins alongside classic bistro silverware. Namba’s cooking is broadly French, fine-tuned with a distinctly Japanese attention to detail. Thanks to LA’s vast network of farmers, nearly every dish is finished with a flourish of seasonal greens or a shower of herbs. Like all good bistros, this one serves a roast chicken as burnished as a penny, uncharacteristically earthy and sweet thanks to the funky, flavor-intensifying power of koji. It’s served in a seaweed cream sauce that tastes like the distillation of a warm ocean breeze. Loup de mer fillets are shellacked in a tingling sansho-pepper-infused butter and topped with a storm of grated daikon. Kaplan, a sake evangelist, pairs French wines and harmonious sakes with abalone pot pies and fluffy shoku-pan croque-madames. Camélia is never just one thing. Always both, always and. —Elazar Sontag
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GIOVEDÌ
Photographs by Courtney Mau
Giovedì translates to “Thursday” in Italian, the night when Jennifer Akiyoshi and chef Bao Tran once hosted dinner for friends and family in their condo’s dining room. Four years later, dishes similar to those they cooked at home characterize their inviting Chinatown restaurant, which mingles Tran’s Italian culinary background with pan-Asian ingredients, all situated in a historic Honolulu neighborhood known for its unvarnished charm and diverse Asian communities. These eclectic inspirations are in conversation at the table. Kampachi crudo is gilded with Calabrian chili crisp, makrut lime kosho, and a snowfall of bottarga. Buoyant bánh tiêu sesame doughnuts are paired with ribbons of prosciutto and peppy giardiniera for a Southeast Asian take on gnocco fritto. Smoky lap cheong deepens an Amatriciana made with egg noodles sourced from nearby Yat Tung Chow Noodle Factory. Local food in Hawai‘i is singular, defined by the natural merging of flavors across the islands’ many diasporas. Giovedì, an extension of that ethos, fits right in. —Jennifer Hope Choi
Photographs by Michelle Groskopf
At Komal’s counter in the bustling Mercado La Paloma, chef Fátima Juárez will ask what kind of masa you’d like for lunch. Would you prefer your tetela—that triangular cheese-filled specialty of Oaxaca—made with sweet yellow corn? With heartier, earthen purple corn? With pink kernels that glimmer like precious stones? Ask nicely, and she’ll go further, blending two or even three varieties of masa from a workstation behind the counter into stunning marbled creations that highlight the nuanced differences in each corn’s taste and texture. This kind of culinary finesse is right at home inside Mercado La Paloma, the food hall that also houses Holbox, the Michelin-starred seafood counter where Juárez got her start nixtamalizing corn. Komal’s dishes, like rowboat-shaped sheaths of masa filled with velvety ayocote beans, are mostly sourced from the traditions of Mexico, supplemented occasionally by Juárez’s curiosity for the masa-based dishes of other Latin American countries. Angelenos aren’t exactly starved of fresh tortillas, but lunch at Komal is enough to make anyone wonder if they’ve ever really known corn. —Elazar Sontag
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LENOX
Photographs by Kyle Johnson
Seeking inspiration for his first restaurant, Jhonny Reyes traced his grandparents’ path from Puerto Rico to New York City, and his own from New York City to Seattle, where his family moved when he was six. Inside Lenox, palm fronds throw shimmering shadows and rattan lampshades cast a lazy glow. A subway sign for the line below Lenox Avenue, the artery that runs north-south through central Harlem, leads to the kitchen. The chef’s many homes color his menu: Flaky empanadas stuffed with shredded chicken are like something you might find at an uptown bodega; a bright salad of sweet corn, pickled cherries, and summer squash screams Seattle; a piña colada, the beachiest of beach drinks, is clarified and rendered dangerously quenching. Each dish is a snapshot of the chef’s life, presented with no pomp or ego. It’s challenging to cover so much culinary ground without losing the plot, but for Reyes it’s second nature. —Elazar Sontag
MEZCALERIA ALMA
Photographs by Stephen Cardinale
A pair of hungry friends could work through most of Mezcaleria Alma’s one-page menu in a sitting—about a dozen electric dishes including tender pockets of masa filled with melty cheese and applewood-smoked tuna and bowls of leaf-green kanpachi ceviche shot through with dill. The bottle list, however, would make for an eternity of great drinking without ever repeating your order. A mighty bar to one side of the open kitchen is outfitted with row upon row of mezcal and tequila, sotol, pechuga, and palmilla, glimmering and reflecting light into the terra-cotta-hued dining room. Spirits can be swirled and sipped as is, or transformed into studied cocktails like a zingy, earthy corn sour with elote mezcal, corn liqueur, corn whiskey, and a smoky Mayan liquor called pox. In the span of two years, co-owners Johnny and Kasie Curiel have opened four restaurants, each a window into Mexico’s dynamic food heritage. At Mezcaleria Alma, they’ve turned their knack for world-building to Mexican spirits. The restaurant finds a rare balance: a bar with the depth of knowledge to educate curious drinkers, and a restaurant whose food is nothing short of transportive. —Kate Kassin
Photographs by Cayce Clifford
Since 2018 the smell of rosemary emanating from an Emeryville, California, food hall meant Fernay McPherson was cooking. At her small kiosk she fried chicken in batter redolent of the herb and coaxed every ounce of flavor from pots of braised collard greens. In a fast-casual setting hers was slow, deliberate cooking, earning her a reputation as one of the Bay Area’s most talented chefs. When a storefront became available last year in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, blocks from McPherson’s family home, she moved in. Televisions above a shiny black bar cycle through grainy reruns of the early ’90s sitcom A Different World. A black-and-white cityscape printed along one wall depicts Fillmore Street during McPherson’s father’s childhood in the ’60s, a vibrant center of jazz and Black life. Nostalgia floats through the air as ’90s R&B fills the dining room. Tables waver under the weight of gooey mac and cheese, candied yams varnished with sugary syrup, and baskets of that exceptional fried chicken. During the rare lull in service, McPherson watches over this scene from the bar, catching up with longtime customers and friends from the neighborhood. For McPherson and her adoring fans, Minnie Bell’s is less a new beginning than a warm return. —Elazar Sontag
SUN MOON STUDIO
Photographs by Cayce Clifford
With only 12 seats, Sun Moon Studio is booked six weeks out. This is a meal you plan for, one you anticipate. Yet there’s a relaxed comfort to dinner in the airy concrete-floored loft, starting with the Taiwanese sausage that arrives as an early bite, wedged into homemade brioche like a tiny hot dog and plucked up between two fingers. Over about 12 courses, you’ll eat rosy pink pork from one of Northern California’s best farms and intensely savory butter made with miso from Shared Cultures, a small-batch producer coveted by local chefs. Santa Barbara uni is suspended over tofu made with soy milk from Hodo Foods, the Bay Area’s favorite purveyor, dressed in a clean gingery soy sauce. The earnestness with which chef-couple Sarah Cooper and Alan Hsu approach their vision makes Sun Moon Studio feel like a collaborative culinary experiment, a team project you’ve been invited to join in on. Find the most passionate food people in the Bay Area; celebrate their work. In the region where this culinary philosophy first took root, dinner at Sun Moon Studio still feels like a revelation. —Elazar Sontag
Restaurant Editor: Elazar Sontag
Project Manager: Kate Kassin
Scouters: Amiel Stanek, Jennifer Hope Choi, Joseph Hernandez, Pervaiz Shallwani, Sam Stone
Production Editor: Alma Avalle
Creative Director: Caroline Newton
Visuals: Ingu Chen, Leurin Estevez, Megan Paetzhold, Travis Rainey, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Marc Williams, Disco Meisch