NYC's 10 best new restaurants of 2023

A quartet of hospitality professionals-turned-friends opened this sensational “unconventional” Thai restaurant on a darling block in Carroll Gardens in September. Crowds quickly grew in and outside the breezily comfortable, no-reservations dazzler for its fantastic novel cocktails and unforgettable preparations like the crab croquettes with tom yum purée, tiger shrimp nonpareil and fiery “what the hell” fried rice. Ask about the specialty spirits and secret drinks. 

Although it officially opened last year, this one was Tatiana’s. The accolade-accruing Lincoln Center destination with Afro-Caribbean influences was the calendar’s most talked-about restaurant for its excellent food and drinks and genuinely convivial atmosphere. Lovely, lofty and beautifully appointed, its crispy okra’s a delight, its braised oxtails are conversation pausing and its short rib pastrami is a revelation. 

Fabulous Figure Eight filled Cornelia Street’s famed Pearl Oyster Bar address and followed antecedent Silver Apricot right next door in November. Menu items inspired by southern and Chinese-American cuisine like the hot fried skate with buttermilk ranch and a sesame biscuit, the pork ribs and a seafood tower that’s topped with the finest lobster tail in town all help this newcomer rise above the rest. 

A lot of restaurants aim to claim neighborhood status, but far fewer come by it honestly. Since April, this southern charmer in Williamsburg has been performing the fantastic function of a real deal locals’ locale. It’s easy to get a table but still feels lively, and the braised collard greens with bits of pork shoulder, the bone-in Delmonico, the magnificent fried crab claws and the transplendent key lime pie are also worth traveling for. 

Justine’s first began elegantly gracing its Hudson Street tables with seasonal Filipino and French-inflected fare this past April. Its dining room is the stuff of Sex and the City fantasies with early hits like the smoked crab and whitefish salad with a huge coconut rice cracker and an American Wagyu hanger steak that was one of the best in recent memory. The frequently updated menu offers as much reason to come back as the unrivaled wine list.

More-or-less destined for chatter even before it opened in September, Fort Greene’s latest bistro, from a couple names bold-faced for fairly disparate reasons, is already famed for its roast chicken. It has a lot else to like in its lightly maritime environs, too, including its tender pork shoulder and blue cheese-butter steak. 

An “unusual” Italian restaurant on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, Café Mars’ hospitality should be the standard. Dinner in the Jetsons-lite quarters, which debuted in May, begins with an uncommon gesture via welcome drinks—typically something like a modest sparkling white wine—in fancy glasses, and expands to inventive foodstuffs like the imaginatively fast food-reminiscent baked potato gnocchi, great big pork rib parm and the boozy jell-olive jigglers. The latter, much discussed last spring, could have collapsed under its own photogenic virality, but Café Mars is too good for all that. 

To be fair, your server still does the tabletop grilling at this Korean barbecue follow-up to Michelin-starred restaurants Kochi and Mari, but absentmindedly moving meat around is still as close to cooking as some New Yorkers will get in a week. The all dry-aged pork cuts sizzling in midtown since September are full of concentrated flavor, and the $80 butcher’s special is a veritable feast, and a tour of the nuance between its loin, belly, collar, jowl and rib. Gyeran jjim and jjigae aren’t included here, but the pillowy egg soufflé and kimchi, tofu, squash and mushroom-packed stew demand addition. 

The jewel of Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row isn’t its big blue box jewelry shop, but rather Nasrin’s kitchen, the family-run Persian restaurant that perched on a second floor above 57th Street in June. Of all the places aspiring to feel like somebody’s personal this-or-that, this one actually does, to warmly casual effect. Here, trimmed carnations top tables in the cozy space, where plates like the zereshk polo ba morgh’s braised chicken covered in basmati rice mingles with emerald pistachios and ruby-red berries that gleam like gems.

True bar-and-restaurants are increasingly rare in New York City, where that former section ends up dedicated to dining more and more. Likewise red sauce spots, which, like dive bars, must become, rather than emerge fully formed from some press release. Ridgewood’s Velma started doing both, or all three, depending on how you count, in January, with a sidecar-accompanied, properly frigid martini, genre classics like fried calamari and chicken parm and a signature dual design.