Where should you eat tonight? We know. We’ve done the legwork. Jeff Gordinier, Esquire’s Food & Drinks editor, has been logging countless miles for the past 12 months, crisscrossing this big country looking for the best eats, the best drinks, the best backstories, the best vibes. Behold Esquire’s Best New Restaurants, class of 2019, a list that celebrates what it means to eat well right now in America, with all its diversity and dynamism. We hope you're hungry.
Ten minutes north of the White House and its sour, divisive rhetoric, immigrants are throwing a party. Unfettered joy radiates from inside Seven Reasons as you stand outside the front door, and once you enter and sit down, that joy makes itself known—proudly, defiantly—in the riot of flavors and hues that chef Enrique Limardo sends out from the kitchen. Limardo and several members of his team come from Venezuela, a country in the midst of collapse, and yet the Latin American food and cocktails at Seven Reasons—a mountain of black rice topped with prawns and pork cheeks, a salad in which the summery tang of tomatoes has been concentrated into cubes of jelly, a platter of hamachi tiradito whose pink and green splashes of salmon roe and jalapeño could hang in an art gallery—serve up jubilation as a remedy for pain and color as a cure for the blues. Is there almost too much packed into each bite? No one’s complaining. More-is-more extravagance is what makes Seven Reasons a fiesta you never want to stop. Seven Reasons at 2208 Fourteenth Street NW
As I held an oyster to my nose, I noticed something. A musk was hiding in the mignonette. I looked back at the menu. Oh, right. The sauce was “scented with fragrance from mangda water beetle.” Pim Techamuanvivit’s menu at Nari (executed nightly by chef de cuisine Meghan Clark) overflows with lovely surprises like that. Nari integrates California produce into traditional recipes that Thai women have passed along for generations, like gaeng gradang (fried nuggets of northern Thai headcheese) and kapi plah (a funky spread of smashed prawns and shrimp paste). I’m willing to bet you have never tried an eggplant curry as assertive as Techamuanvivit’s gaeng bumbai aubergine. You want to, though. Nari at 1625 Post Street
The name means “good times” in French, of course, and what’s impressive about Bon Temps is that you can interpret that however you want. Come by in the morning and score a pain au chocolat that makes you moan. Drop in as the sun goes down and kiss a crudité martini (somehow it involves the essence of cucumbers and snap peas, and there’s a cute carrot balancing on the rim) while you opt for a second helping of the blue prawns with the crispy, salty heads or the ethereal micro-tart that pairs a cloud of uni custard with a quenelle of caviar. You could easily conjure a full meal from the canapés alone, relishing the way Lincoln Carson brings a pastry chef’s mind-set to savory nuggets like the tomato tartare and the chicken liver puff, but then you’d miss all the other stuff he excels at. (We mean this as a compliment: Bon Temps is a restaurant with multiple personalities.) Go all in at night: a whole Jidori chicken, risotto thickened with bone marrow, a chocolate soufflé with Chartreusey ice cream riding shotgun. The magic of Carson’s all-purpose downtown atelier is that it’s serving food as luxurious and meticulous as anything in Paris or Tokyo but it’s doing so with a sprezzatura breeziness that makes the whole experience feel like a day at the beach. Bon Temps at 712 South Santa Fe Avenue
Yeah, we are aware that chef Lincoln Carson is fifty. But after decades of unsung brilliance behind the scenes with chefs like Michael Mina, Carson has inspired late bloomers everywhere with the vision and precision of his cooking at Bon Temps.
Pizzeria Beddia would probably snatch a spot on this list for the mere fact that it has a party room where you can throw down with magnums of wine and a “hoagie omakase experience,” as the place advertises it. (Am I dreaming?) But even if you simply dine with the regular crowd, chef Joe Beddia’s geeked-out approach to cheese-and-crust mastery (a recent summer pie involved New Jersey peaches and a garlic-thyme cream), on-the-nose appetizers like a bowl of Judion beans bathing in olive oil, and a gently curveballing wine list mean that you will only fail to enjoy your dinner if you happen to be dead inside. Pizzeria Beddia at 1313 North Lee Street
You’re likely to come across words like ogbono and egusi on the menu at Benne on Eagle, and that’s because it celebrates the debt that Appalachian food owes to African cuisine. But with rising star Ashleigh Shanti working side by side in the kitchen with Asheville luminary John Fleer, the history lesson happens to be delicious. Deviled eggs are converted into a dip for crudités; chicken wings turn absurdly tender after a braise in pot likker, the liquid you get after you cook collard greens. Come back in the a.m.—there is no better breakfast than trout and grits. Benne on Eagle at 35 Eagle Street
A meal at Alewife feels, to me, like a feast aboard a friendly pirate ship: Everything’s loose and lively, and chef Lee Gregory’s seafood-driven menu lends itself to communal revelry. I piled into the place with a bunch of friends and children, and the group devoured the fried Calabash crab claws with Old Bay aioli with such gluttonous alacrity that we had to ask for a second order, and then a third. Alewife at 3120 East Marshall Street
I have grown wary of new Italian restaurants. There are so damn many of them all over the country, and for the most part they succumb to copying one another. But every now and then a pasta emporium comes along (last year it was Misi in New York, and in 2017 it was Felix Trattoria in southern California) whose handiwork with flour, water, and salt turns me into a quivering mess of pleasure. Proceeding through each of the five courses of chef Stefano Secchi’s pasta tasting menu at Rezdôra—a restaurant conceived as a tribute to the many excellent eats from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy—gripped me with such noodle euphoria that I morphed into Meg Ryan during that climax in When Harry Met Sally.... I apologize to anyone who was sitting near me—although eventually the same thing happened to them. Rezdôra at 27 East Twentieth Street
Someone mentioned this place to me when I was in North Carolina, and I made the stupidly impulsive decision to rent a car and drive seven hours to Alabama on a sweltering Sunday. Grouchy and groggy by the time I parked in front of Automatic, bummed out by one too many radio broadcasts about the Book of Revelation, I sat down on a barstool and saw the light. The oysters were fresh, the A.S.O. cocktail was cold, and dishes like a crispy fish collar with Calabrian chili butter and flaky fish ribs with Alabama white sauce floored me with their direct-hit deliciousness. Chef Adam Evans, a product of Muscle Shoals, is paying homage to a specifically southern tradition of seafood cookery, and he’s doing it in a spacious, wide-windowed room that feels like a boat club where nobody’s a snob. It’s worth the trip. I should know. Automatic Seafood and Oysters at 2824 Fifth Avenue South
Look, sometimes a great restaurant takes a while to hit its stride. We’re aware that Kwame Onwuachi’s Kith/Kin opened about two years ago, but we’re stretching the boundaries of “newness” here because it would be a travesty not to raise a toast to the audacity and originality of his cooking down by the Wharf. Nowhere else in America are you going to find a menu that so confidently and autobiographically nods to Nigeria, New Orleans, and the Caribbean. Nowhere else are you going to find delights like Onwuachi’s bracingly spicy crab jollof rice or his meltingly tender goat roti or the scallops and brassicas. And nowhere else are you going to eat sweets like the ones created by pastry chef Paola Velez, who deserves a James Beard Award nomination for trailblazing a way to serve habanero peppers as a dessert—accompanied by tres leches cake and elderflower snow. Kith/Kin at 801 Wharf Street SW
The long-overdue rise of African-American chefs around the country is the most exciting culinary movement in the world. Kwame Onwuachi—who came back from early failure to score big with his cooking at Kith/Kin and the publication of his essential memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef—has become a leader in an ongoing conversation about where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.
The best Mexican food I ate this year came from the kitchen of Gabe Erales, who seems to have merged the rampant creativity that he got from working at René Redzepi’s Noma Mexico pop-up with a soulful reverence for tradition that he absorbed from his mom. The result: dishes—like a tamal stuffed with goat barbacoa, and a thin, crispy milanesa made with quail and paired with a red mole—that taste totally new without being vain about it. Comedor has something called “masa spaetzel” that I want served to me in a bucket when I’m on my deathbed, and it’s got a chocolate tamal for dessert that I expect to encounter if I make it to heaven. Comedor at 501 Colorado Street
Nothing surprised me more this year than cruising along a dark patch of the Pacific Coast Highway and finding myself in a space as sexy as some next-wave bistronomy outpost in Provence. Gallic songbirds trilled from an old reel-to-reel machine. Wine and bread and butter and fresh seafood arrived in gentle waves, followed by artful constructions of vegetables and fish—courtesy of chef Andrew Bachelier, whose roots are Mexican and French—that made me wonder how some of the finest Cali-French cooking in the U.S. can be found a few exits south of a military base. Jeune et Jolie at 2659 State Street
In the fifteen years since he gave the American restaurant scene a hard elbow to the sternum with the arrival of Momofuku Noodle Bar, David Chang had never opened a restaurant that wholeheartedly bear-hugged his Korean heritage—until Kāwi, that is. By offering the Seoul-born fine-dining veteran Eunjo Park carte blanche in the kitchen, Chang is treating Manhattan to an unfiltered dose of fire and funk, which is all the more surprising when you realize that Kāwi is serving yesterday’s stinky soybean stew (that’s what it’s called) and bowls of raw clams in the sterile, Stanley Kubrickian hallways of the Hudson Yards shopping mall. Toto, we’re not in a food court anymore: Pay attention to the way the foie gras segues into the rice in the kimbap; tune in to that sustained power chord of heat hovering behind the raw fish in the hwedupbap. Park’s Wagyu ragù—with long semi-scissored rice cakes flooded with a sweet, meaty Bolognese—might be my favorite dish of 2019. Kāwi at 20 Hudson Yards, #501
I’m bound to love any restaurant that has a dessert called “we finally got a piece of the pie.” (And if you don’t get the reference, or the extra layer of meaning behind it, I’m not going to explain it to you here.) The entire menu at Virtue is like a spread at a family reunion piled high with dishes that inspire such love. Moist cornbread cradling a pat of butter the size of a bar of soap. Shrimp blanketed in rémoulade on a crunchy bed of fried green tomatoes. Velvety mac and cheese. But chef Erick Williams reveals his virtuosity with lighter dishes, like a plate of broccoli, garlanded with pecans and chunks of cheese, that is guaranteed to become a favorite at any Thanksgiving table where it happens to show up. Virtue at 1462 East Fifty-Third Street
Once so fresh, the omakase/kaiseki game in America can sometimes feel bedeviled by performative stiffness, lunatic prices, and high-decibel customers with a lot of money and no class. (See a very special episode of Billions.) That’s why it’s so refreshing to find two new sanctuaries with plenty of local soul. At Sushi Note (a name which could be viewed as an allusion to musical notes, or a note slipped under a door, or even the Blue Note record label), chef Kiminobu Saito tailors each bite of his omakase offering to the rhythms of conversation and whim, in the spirit of the American jazz masters he reveres. And at Odo, chef Hiroki Odo prepares a kaiseki meal—with sushi by Seong Cheol Byun midway through, as a sort of symphonic movement with a guest soloist—that delivers one seasonal surprise after another. At both restaurants you’ll have fun, and I’m guessing you weren’t expecting that. Sushi Note at 13447 Ventura Boulevard; Odo at 17 West Twentieth Street
When you’re craving Texas barbecue, the first place you imagine finding it probably isn’t alongside a clean and tidy hotel lobby in the Pacific Northwest. But try as you might to remain skeptical, there’s no denying the righteousness of that slow-smoked beef rib when chef Doug Adams slips on the black rubber gloves and starts carving you a slab. The texture of the Texas red tamale finds a creamy, steamy middle ground between pudding and pound cake. Commence the evening with a mezcal pickleback infused with charred corn and smoked chiles and you’ll be drifting through the Hill Country before you know it. Bullard at 813 Southwest Alder Street
Wayan is like a round of love texts that ping back and forth between Cédric Vongerichten (son of French-born global gastro-deity Jean-Georges) and his wife, Ochi, who grew up in Indonesia. She’s the one you meet when you walk in and who can school you on the significance (both cultural and personal) of nasi goreng and corn fritters, lobster noodles and clams Jimbaran-style, which are so packed with flavor you might as well be biting into oceanic truffles. But you’re not incorrect to detect a Vongerichtenish touch (bold flavor being something of a family heirloom) in the way the mango plays with the mint. It’s fusion with a heart—and without any bitter colonialist aftertaste. Wayan at 20 Spring Street
It's the team-up of the year: Chef Kwame Onwuachi of Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. and Chef Cédric Vongerichten of Wayan in New York are cooking up something good to help us celebrate 38 years of Best New Restaurants. Book your tickets now for Esquire's Taste of Two Cities at Wayan—featuring a four-course dinner with wine, cocktails, and good conversation, of course—through Resy. Buy Tickets
Alta Adams is more than a mere restaurant. It’s a hang. It’s a place to chow down and loosen up as you distribute warm embraces to friends from the old neighborhood and friends you just met fifteen minutes ago. Keith Corbin’s cooking makes you keep waving the server back to your table for more: “Wait, actually, I know we’re already getting the oxtails and rice, but can we get the skillet fried chicken, too, and the candied yam gratin?” Corbin’s collaboration with California pioneer Daniel Patterson already feels as though it has been a beloved fixture for decades. Alta Adams at 5359 West Adams Boulevard
If you have grown weary of “gastronomy” and its countless pretenses, this chill, female-fronted hangout might be your end-of-the-decade antidote. Natural wines get generous pours. Chewy sourdough, baked in-house and drenched obscenely in olive oil, begs for a schmear of chicken livers tickled with Madeira. Celery (yeah, celery) will be ignored no longer after it takes a tumble with dates, pistachios, and the pheromonal fish sauce called colatura. Baltimore (yeah, Baltimore) can now make rightful claim to having the sexiest third-date spot in America. Le Comptoir du Vin at 1729 Maryland Avenue
Allison Plumer is cooking what you want to eat when it’s Friday night and you’d prefer not to ruin your appetite with overthinking. The burger is very good, but what I kept daydreaming about after visiting Billy Durney’s ode to the old New York were the croquettes (which tasted like ham and cheese and rye from a corner bodega by way of Barcelona), and the wedge salad with a rasher of bacon as big as a baseball bat, and the confidence of the Hemingway daiquiri—as though the bartender understands that this is a tavern, damn it, and the cocktails matter. Red Hook Tavern at 329 Van Brunt Street
Here’s the plan. Grab a long table during lunchtime at Vivian Ku’s bright Taiwanese canteen and order everything. The dan dan noodles, the sandwiches with pork belly and five-spice beef, the thousand-layer pancake with egg and cheese—all of it practically shimmering with just-cooked freshness. Eat. Then roll a few frames at Highland Park Bowl so that you can work up an appetite for a second go. Joy at 5100 York Boulevard
All it said on the menu was “braised artichoke.” (Having grown up in California, I feel a kinship with artichokes, but it’s pretty easy to mess them up. I have learned to accept disappointment.) Guess what. I have never had a more perfect artichoke than the one I wolfed down during lunch one afternoon at Green Almond Pantry. The place is a counter with only eight stools, but chef Cagla Onal, who grew up in Turkey, seems to treat each salad and dip and Mediterranean sandwich and roasted vegetable with the sort of loving care you’d expect from l’Arpège in Paris. I later emailed Onal about the braised artichoke, and she sent me a delicate, multistep recipe involving olives, lemon peel, parsley, mint, and sweet onion. Always remember: “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy,” and the size of a place is no indication of its ambition. Green Almond Pantry at 1314 Ninth Street NW
Special Honors Go To...
The owners of the thirty-five-year-old Gotham Bar & Grill kicked off a summer skirmish when they bid farewell to downtown stalwart Alfred Portale and replaced him with Chilean culinary firebrand Victoria Blamey, whose hold-nothing-back approach to acid and spice is a far cry from the tuna tartare of yore. By now, she has utterly recharged a restaurant that had vanished from the conversation. We’re rooting for her.
Antonio Bachour, raised in Puerto Rico, has become an Instagram star because of his jewel-like, wildly creative sweets, but at his new full-service restaurant in the Miami area, we also get to see how a virtuoso baker can work miracles with a Cuban sandwich and an avocado toast.
She knows how to mix a delicious cocktail, sure, but what makes Chelsea Gregoire such a game changer at Baltimore’s True Chesapeake Oyster Co. (where she's also the general manager) is her radical, generous-spirited approach to inclusiveness: Her actual goal is to make sure that everyone feels at home.
Step through the door of the windowless building in Culver City and get time-warped to a bygone Hollywood era of steaks and oysters Rockefeller and martinis. Dear John’s, the deliciously retro brainchild of chef Hans Röckenwagner and his wife and business partner, Patti, as well as chef Josiah Citrin, is a time capsule with a shelf life: The building will be torn down in April 2021. Go now. At least the memories will last forever. —Kevin Sintumuang
Occasionally dim sum can be a bit of a bait-and-switch: divine in the abstract, disappointing in execution, at least in the United States. But Hutong, a Hong Kong must-visit that has opened an outpost in midtown Manhattan, fully delivers on the glorious promise of everything dim sum can be. Hutong's magnificent, meticulously crafted bites—via chef Fei Wang—are what dumpling dreams are made of.
This article appears in the Winter '20 issue of Esquire. Subscribe Now
