Jersey City Heights is hotbed of Mexican fare, including over a half dozen taquerias, dance halls and bars with food, and sit-down restaurants; Los Amigos is one of the best and most inexpensive, featuring Sinaloan basket tacos and Oaxcan memelas, among many other things in a very old fashioned space.

Work your way through the tangle of highway underpasses and overpasses to find this docked flying saucer that was once a kiosk at the 1939 World’s Fair. In 1946, it was put on a flatbed and dragged to the bottom of a hill beneath the Jersey City Heights. The counter inside is as circular as the exterior, and wondrous cheeseburgers are cooked there, along with hot dogs, fries, onion rings, and slender sandwiches, including Taylor ham (a.k.a. pork roll), the national meat of New Jersey.

Owners Drew Buzzio, Marc Magliozzi, and executive chef, Matthew Moschella founded Corto in Jersey City’s remote and relaxing Heights neighborhood in 2018. They focused on simple home cooking, using a shifting roster of recipes and ingredients true to the season. Recently, Eater staffers found the chef barbecuing lamb shanks on the back patio, and a meal included rigatoni in a tomato sauce flavored with pancetta and Calabrian chile, and a splendid charcuterie and cheese plate.

Owner Venu Rachuri’s Sri Ganesh’s Dosa House — its blue awning featuring the elephant-headed god — was the second southern Indian restaurant to appear in the neighborhood dubbed India Square in the ’90s, just as the Gujarati dominance was waning. The menu presents dozens of dosas, the crisp, thin crepes made from a batter of naturally fermented rice and lentils, with a variety of stuffings. But it is also offers other classics from a strictly vegetarian menu, including idly, pongal, and upma. Place your order at the counter, take a number, and sit down until your dishes are called.

Mithaas is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that concentrates on the food of the South, with the usual freshly prepared dosas, uttapams, and composed rice casseroles like bisi bele bath. Every day a thali is prepared, the name designating a composite meal of curries, chutneys, dals, and breads served on a round metal tray. But Mithaas doubles as a sweet shop, and glass cases are filled with milk-based treats in a rainbow of colors, some flaunting gold- or silver-leaf decorations.

NYC has a wealth of restaurants serving Dominican, Jamaican, Cuban, Trinidadian, Puerto Rican, and Barbadian food, but what about the other 700 or so islands less represented? That deficiency was partly remedied in 2020 by the appearance of Freetown Road Project. The menu represents the food of Antigua and Barbuda, and the chef is Claude Lewis, The pepperpot is the best you’ve ever tried, deeply colored, slightly spicy, and fully flavorful, and other specialties abound.

The restaurant recently offered limited seated dinners available on Resy, a change for what had primarily been a takeout place. The menu changes frequently, but look for any freshwater fish, like hilsa; chicken curry; and the mustard-oil-laced vegetarian dishes called bhortas. Owner and chef is Nur-E Gulshan Rahman but she gets lots of help from her daughter.

Jersey City has its own iconic hot dog counter, in this case it’s bright yellow and also selling the conventional gritty drinks of NYC institutions like Papaya King. But Jersey dogs don’t come topped with sauerkraut and caramelized canned onions, rather there’s a meaty topping often described as chili, even though it’s more like an onion-y Greek meat sauce. Currently owned by John Bardis, whose father Speros bought the narrow place in 1962, Boulevard Drinks has been around since 1937.

One of the city’s best and smokiest barbecues is found in Jersey City’s plush Hamilton Park neighborhood. Hamilton Pork has lovely summer seating in a side yard, and the dark interior could double as a beer hall. Barbecued offerings run from the core favorites (brisket, pulled pork, chicken, beef ribs) to the lesser-seen (pork belly, lamb ribs, habanero cheddar sausage), along with barbecue tacos and a whole slew of sides.

Newport is an unexpected location for one of the metropolitan area’s best Hunan restaurants, with lots of fiery choices and pleasing ingredients like smoked bamboo, pickled chiles, pork belly, eggplants, and yes, the cuisine’s signature fish head. The menu also offers Sichuan fare and plenty of vegetarian dishes, but skip the steamed dumplings.

Samakmak is another of Jersey City’s distinctive Alexandrian restaurants, offering a menu of simply grilled or fried fish, a half dozen selections per day. The front of the premises is a fish market, but go through the door at the rear to find the restaurant, decorated with a skyline of Alexandria. In fact, you can grab your fish in front and carry it to the back to be cooked. Shrimp or calamari, fried or in tomato sauce, are also available. For dessert, don’t miss kanafa or rice pudding.

Owned by Adnan Kwara, a nephew of the Mamoun’s founder Mamoun Chater, Ibby’s has been a dining resource of the historic downtown neighborhood for 25 years. Favorites on a fundamental Lebanese-Syrian menu include lamb shawarma and falafel sandwiches whose chickpea-bearing orbs are notably fried to order. Vegetarians will do spectacularly here, with a fattoush salad filled with crisp toasted pita, or a platter of baba ganoush and foul — the garlic-stewed fava beans. This remains a budget option in a neighborhood with an upscale restaurant collection.

Dan Richer founded Razza Pizza Artiginale right on Grove Street in 2012. It was destined to become one of the most respected pizzerias on the Eastern seaboard early on: The pies come out of the wood oven round and puffy, charred here and there, and delectably good in a sourdough-y way. Topping ingredients run from the straightforward — fresh mozzarella and canned tomatoes — to the more unusual, like orange winter squash, cream, fermented chile paste, fingerling potatoes, raclette, and hazelnuts. This place is also big on bread and butter, as well as short dishes in a modern Italian vein.

Fourteen-year-old Bistro La Source is tucked away in a residential neighborhood near the Colgate clock. Its strength lies not only in its comfortable interior and parking-lot outdoor dining area, but in its conventional bistro menu. The scaled-down bouillabaisse and hopelessly rich cassoulet are good examples, but one is also free to dine more lightly on bone marrow and chanterelles or French onion soup.

Harry’s Daughter combines Jamaican and Trinidadian elements — via fashion designer Ria Ramkissoon and actor Alasdair Cotter — into one big Caribbean restaurant. There are Trini bakes with a variety of seaworthy fillings, jerk chicken, and some African American dishes as well. Located in the Communipaw neighborhood, the restaurant is convenient to the Statue of Liberty and Liberty Science Center, making it great for kids.

A rather cocktail-loungey restaurant along the Hackensack River waterfront, with views of Newark across the water, Mamak House offers a deep dive into Malaysian cuisine with a few Chinese and Indonesian flourishes. For an introduction to the cuisine, try nasi lemak, a rice-based dish topped with a dark chicken curry and anchovy relish. Okra with fermented belacan sauce is another highlight, and so is Hokkien char mee — thick wheat noodles slicked with a dark fragrant sauce and topped with crisp fried shallots.