The 18 Best New Restaurants In NYC - New York - The Infatuation (2024)

When new restaurants open, we check them out. We subject our stomachs and social lives to the good, the bad, and more often than not, the perfectly fine. And every once in a while, a new spot makes us feel like Adam Sandler at a sweatpants sale. When that happens, we add it here, to The Hit List.

The Hit List is where you’ll find all of the best new restaurants in New York. As long as it opened within the past several months and we’re still talking about it, it’s on this guide. The latest addition might be a buzzy new restaurant with caviar priced by the bump. Or it might be an under-the-radar lunch counter, where a few dollars gets you something that rattles around in your brain like a loose penny in a dryer.

Keep tabs on the Hit List and you'll always know just which new restaurants you should be eating at right now. (If you're looking for more Brooklyn spots, check out our borough-specific Hit List, too.)

​​New to the Hit List (6/24): Massara, Carnitas Ramirez, Blue Hour, Son Del North

THE SPOTS

The people behind Razdôra are, once again, serving little portions of incredible pasta, this time in a two-floor space with a majestic skylight and a pizza oven sourced from Campania. Massara is a new Southern Italian spot in Flatiron, and it’s home to a contender for dish of the summer: chilled spaghetti with uni, tomato sauce, and raw red prawn. Pair that pasta with a Neapolitan pizzette, a glass of aglianico rosé, and, budget permitting, a $40 langoustine cooked on a wood-fired grill. If you can’t land a reservation, there are two bars saved for walk-ins.

It’s the year of the restaurant sequel (see Massara, San Sabino, Penny), and Carnitas Ramirez has us feeling as elated as we did after watching Dune: Part Two. The small East Village spot from Taqueria Ramirez specializes in carnitas, and they're worth the line you’ll have to wait in. The whole pig is cooked snout-to-tail in big steel vats just behind the counter, and you can pick which parts you want on each $5 taco. Grab at least a few surtida tacos—a multi-textural adventure with bits from the entire pig. For a more focused taco, we like the tender lengua and the savory chamorro. Get a $3 side of chicharron to crumble on top, and load up on the salsa verde at the salsa station.

Many have tried to recreate that most iconic—and dare we say, revolutionary—of handheld foods: Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme. (Super Burrito’s Dankwrap comes to mind.) Blue Hour, a takeout window inside a Bushwick gas station, truly nails it. Their “Cwunch Wap Supweme” is compact, contained, and has a tostada inside that stays crispy, even after your walk home. You’ll also feel less like a human trash bag after eating it, thanks to high quality—and 100% halal—ingredients. Along with the menu’s other late-night New York classics (chicken over rice, chopped cheese), the wrap is also under $10. If you’re wondering why BP is suddenly making fancy fried chicken sandwiches and passionfruit lemonade—they’re not. This place is from the Little Flower team. It’s open until 10pm on weekdays, and 3am on weekends.

A burrito is only as good as its tortilla—is a new life motto we made up. Try the burritos at Son Del North and you’ll see what we mean. This fast casual burrito counter on the Lower East Side flies in their tortillas from Sonora, which is famous for chewy, flaky tortillas with a high fat content. This spot is also adamantly anti-rice, filling up instead with mayocoba beans, big chunks of avocado, cheese, and your protein of choice. There are five options and our favorite is the steak, thanks to a flavorful coating of sala roja. Son Del North is open until 12am, and already mobbed by the bar crowd, but they keep it moving and those tortillas are worth it.

We’ve been looking forward to Bánh By Lauren’s opening for months—and the pandemic-era popup business turned elegant Chinatown bakery does not disappoint. Their signature pandan honeycomb cake is as pleasurably chewy as a lively conversation, while the moist, flavor-packed chinese sausage, cheddar & chive scone may be even more exciting. There’s also a Vietnamese-inspired coffee menu to play around in: We’ll be drinking the big-time refreshing, sweet-and-sour iced Lime Drip all summer. The bakery is currently open from Thursday to Sunday.

Gangjang gejang, raw crab marinated in soy sauce, has become a favorite of TikTokers and a staple of mukbang videos in the last few years—and Rice Thief has blown up right alongside it. Formerly a ghost-kitchen delivery service, this family business now has a small but lively brick-and-mortar Korean restaurant in Long Island City. Round up some pals (the dishes here are family-sized), crack a bottle of makgeolli, and order up platters of both soy and spicy mixed seafood. The sweet red shrimp and the creamy crab roe in particular are bites we won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

The result of a collaboration between two powerhouses of Eastern European cooking—Veselka and Katz’s Deli—the pastrogi, a pastrami-stuffed pierogi, is only available for a limited time at Veselka’s new Williamsburg location. The restaurant, which sits in the shadow of the BQE on Lorimer Street, is just as comforting and vibrant as the original. A message on their menu board above the open kitchen reads “Veselka is love. PS: Please share it.” There’s no finer way to do that than coming with a couple of friends, splitting stuffed cabbage with mushroom gravy and a side of perfectly grilled kielbasa, several dozen pierogi, and golden-brown blintzes to finish.

Getting an everything bagel fresh out of the oven at Utopia is like winning the lottery—especially at the buzzy new Murray Hill location of the legendary Whitestone bagel specialist, where the everythings run out almost as soon as they’re dumped into their wire basket. But no matter which variety you end up with, your patience for standing in line will be rewarded with a warm, notably puffy bagel. Get it as a sandwich you can really sink your teeth into, overloaded with scallion cream cheese and sliced nova.

Somehow, the swimming pool-sized skylight isn’t our most-favorite thing about Kin Gin, a Japanese restaurant in the Hotel on Rivington. That honor goes to the tontoro, a juicy, nutty grilled pork jowl, glazed in rich brown miso and garnished with crunchy peanuts. Alternate bites of this with sips of the Bakohan, a creamy yet sharp yogurt, gin, and lemongrass co*cktail. This is a good spot for taking in a drink and some afternoon sunshine on the Lower East Side, and grabbing a fancy izakaya dish or two while you’re at it.

We love burgers. We love cheese. We really love fried cheese. And, as it turns out, we really, really love burgers with fried cheese. The Dominican smashburger at El Sazón R.D. in Chinatown is on another level, thanks to an assist from a delightfully squeaky slice of golden-brown queso blanco. But the more traditional Dominican food at this counter-service restaurant, which opened in February, is also great. We like the pork mofongo and the lusciously creamy morir soñando—and the lunch special (meat, rice and beans, water or soda) is a very reasonable $11.95.

Hi. It's June. Have you eaten spring peas yet? You're running out of time. Head to Cafe Mado in Prospect Heights, where the peas are just slightly charred and served with squeaky-soft cheese, and lots of herbs. As our neighbor sitting at the bar said, "I wish peas could always taste like that." From the team behind Place des Fêtes, and located in the old Oxalis space, this all-day cafe works for a breakfast sandwich in the morning, a pan bagnat at lunch, or a dinner of small, vegetable-forward plates in the back dining room— which resembles a sunlit secret garden.

This New Orleans-inspired Fort Greene restaurant has been teasing its opening since last fall. Now it’s finally here, serving Bubba Gump quantities of seafood. They have oysters six ways, a few different dips (crab, smoked fish), and an exhaustive catalog of shrimp dishes, the most noteworthy of which is a sandwich on milk bread with Dukes mayo and giardiniera. Get that, and pair it with some natural wine. The casual front area is saved for walk-ins, but you can also book a table in the back room that looks a bit like a fancy retro diner.

Lucia Pizza’s tiny, sit-down alimentari, which is directly behind their Soho slice shop, is a pizza party for adults. The menu features all our favorites, like the creamed spinach slice, in personal pizza form. There’s also wine, and small plates like caesar salad, and whipped ricotta with orange blossom honey. Plus tiramisu. If you can't get a reservation, try swinging by at lunch for a focaccia sandwich, layered with mortadella and hot soppressata. They make only 25 of them a day, and they start selling them at 12:30pm.

Just in time for summer, Mariscos El Submarino has a second location in Greenpoint (in the former Mitica spot), with a perfect little patio in the back. Mariscos’ aguachiles and tostadas are a Jackson Heights classic, but their big cauldrons of raw fish become peak day-drinking food when you bring them outside. On a nice weekend, there might be an hours-long wait for the handful of patio tables‚ but even if you end up inside, you'll get to eat their excellent aguachile negro or equally formidable verde. Get one of these for the table, then fill out your meal with the cheesy shrimp tacos el gobernador and the craken, a pressed octopus taco that goes great with an icy michelada.

There are few parties livelier than dinner at Sammy's Roumanian, and fewer parties still that will have you dancing the hora and ordering frozen vodka by the bottle. The beloved, nearly half-century-old Jewish steakhouse closed in 2021, and it’s back in a new Lower East Side location. Former regulars will not be disappointed. The house entertainer continues to deliver parody songs (we have a soft spot for "The Girl From Emphysema") from his electronic keyboard, and a pitcher of golden schmaltz still graces every table. They have a $75 prix fixe (with the the option to order a la carte on Thursdays and Sundays): The signature Romanian tenderloin—an absurdly large, garlicky skirt steak—is good, but the chicken liver, mixed tableside, is great.

This booth in Flushing's New York Food Court is devoted to all things crab roe, a Shanghainese favorite. The roster here includes crab roe mooncakes, crab roe spring rolls, crab roe soup dumplings, and more—but our favorite dish so far is the silky crab roe with noodles, which comes with wood ear mushrooms, pickled vegetables, and a soy egg. You won’t regret ordering widely at Xie Bao. If the counter spot went full concert merch stand and started selling crab roe posters and crab roe T-shirts, we'd probably load up on those too.

There are plenty of Filipino kamayan-style meals around town, but the $185 tasting menu at Tadhanà on the Lower East Side is less banana leaf and more liquid nitrogen. The seven courses (with several more small bites) are full of high-end flourishes and made-for-social media moments: like smoke billowing over wagyu ceviche with uni, and a pair of tiny appetizers hidden inside a hollowed-out book. There's a pretty sweet Pinoy hip-hop playlist and it’s BYOB, so plan accordingly for a splashy, fun date. We’ll be back for their punchy house-made aged vinegar, just as soon as they start selling it.

Crudo fatigue is the firstest of first world problems, but just when we thought we were sick of raw seafood and wine, here comes Penny, a new seafood bar in the East Village. The 31-seat counter is situated above its sister restaurant Claud, and you might think snacking here before a full dinner downstairs is the move. But Penny is worth your full attention. Start with the icebox, a luxurious raw bar selection on apersonal tray of ice, and then stick around for stuffed squid, whole lobster, and a creamy oyster roast with puff pastry on top. The shoulder-to-shoulder set-up is slightly chaotic, but when everyone oohs-and-ahhs with you at your rare red rice sake order, you’ll appreciate the camaraderie.