Dining out should be a lot of things — nourishing, thought-provoking, less than a week’s rent — but one that can be easy to forget about is fun. Over the last several years, dining out has been (more than occasionally) somewhat un-fun. Delicious, sure, and inspiring and important, but not necessarily an effortless good time. And honestly, who’s surprised? Social reckonings and politics and pandemics and recessions and all kinds of horrific real-world stuff have intersected with restaurants in a way that had to happen, but which has turned the act of eating food into pretty serious business.

And that’s a good thing; food is serious business. But as we explored the crop of stellar new restaurants that opened between September 2023 and September 2024, we found ourselves — if fleetingly — forgetting about the real world outside the dining room, and settling into meals that felt exciting, confident, and joyful.

In LA, a straight-up bash of a restaurant livens the neighborhood with Thai Japanese drinking bites, cocktails in silly mugs, and communal pop-ups that feel like a party. Though she’s been forced to temporarily close in the wake of Hurricane Helene, an acclaimed chef is rousing her Asheville community by frying up the best damn fish sandwiches within 500 miles of Appalachia. In Vermont, a historic venue hosts what feels like a locals-only family night straight from the farm, but in this case, everyone’s invited.

Fire can be very fun, and it’s the centerpiece of D.C.’s vibrant new ode to Mexico City, and the source of the slow burn behind the Indonesian barbecue sensation that’s conquering California’s East Bay. And then there’s the exhilaration that comes from an underexposed cuisine finally getting its due, like the long-awaited, ambitious Hmong project from a Minneapolis superstar, and a true destination restaurant devoted to Indigenous American cooking, smack on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Acamaya

3070 Dauphine Street | New Orleans, Louisiana

There’s a glossary attached to the menu at Acamaya , the first solo New Orleans restaurant from Mexico City-born chef Ana Castro and her sister, Lydia. With careful explanation, it defines a handful of the restaurant’s prehispanic ingredients — chapulines, chiltepin, epazote, huitlacoche, quelites, and more — from Mexican states like Sinaloa, Sonora, Puebla, and Veracruz. Not everyone needs the vocabulary lesson, but Ana knows some do, and her inclusion of it is just one example of the generous spirit that defines Acamaya, as well as the sisters’ dedication to furthering precolonial, Mesoamerican cooking in the U.S.

Atoma

1411 N. 45th Street | Seattle, Washington

Few things feel less new than “new American.” Almost everyone uses local, fresh, and seasonal ingredients nowadays (or aspires to, anyway). Making your own pasta? Yawn. And thanks, but I already had my French comfort food-inspired classic made with wagyu and, of course, ramps.

The more truly modern take on American food goes beyond locavorism to ignore the limits of locale — and culture and cuisine and background. Chef Johnny Courtney, who co-owns Seattle’s Atoma with his wife, Sarah, had cooked in Denver, Mexico, and Australia before spending several years at Canlis, the preeminent fine dining restaurant in Seattle. Those divergent influences are splattered all over the Atoma menu, but aren’t the only touchstones for what emerges: a more open, less rigid, and less nationalist template for American cooking . A beef tartare is lacquered with Hong Kong-style XO sauce made with local dried geoduck, the famous Pacific Northwest bivalve . Baked Alaska, that old-school American dessert, is livened up by an ice cream made of parsnips and meringue made from charred corn silk. Local lion’s mane mushrooms are breaded and fried katsu-style. Instead of bread service, Atoma offers sourdough crumpets — a riff on a breakfast favorite in the U.K. and Australia — with kefir butter and garlic honey.

Budonoki

654 Virgil Avenue | Los Angeles, California

As the sun sets over a busy stretch of LA’s Virgil Village neighborhood, Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” reverberates through the doorway of Budonoki . Inside, groups deep in conversation gather around tables covered with genre-bending bar bites like grilled pork jowl dressed with crying tiger sauce, tteokbokki-inspired Budo-gnocchi, and pandan-coconut soft serve with a tiny shovel nestled in the swirl. The playful menu from chef Dan Rabilwongse marries his Japanese culinary training with his Thai heritage and LA upbringing to create something that’s far more than the sum of its parts.

The restaurant is stationed at the heart of a neighborhood whose rapid changes have been marked by the arrival of artisanal jams, natural wine, and bagels that come with eternal lines. But Budonoki approaches being a good neighbor with as much intention as it does its food. The place has quickly become a local fixture — somewhere to stroll in casually for an ice-cold beer (or an umeshu cocktail in a kawaii penguin mug), a sub-$15 set meal on “Makanai Monday,” or just some chicken skewers. For Rabilwongse, who grew up in the area, the restaurant is a homecoming, and he feels a responsibility to offer something of value to the community.

Fet-Fisk

4786 Liberty Avenue | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Despite being in landlocked Pittsburgh , everything at Fet-Fisk tastes like the sea. Chef-owner Nik Forsberg transformed a red sauce spot in working-class Bloomfield into what can only be described as a vibey basement party at grandma’s house. The bar is aglow in Lynchian red lights while, in the dining room, wine is served out of a vintage wooden hutch. Artfully plated Scandi-modern dishes are served on flowery china and frilly placemats. These oxymoronic traits somehow harmonize perfectly inside Fet-Fisk, where nothing feels like a mishmash — especially not the menu, which leans Scandinavian in all its cured, acidic glory.

Fikscue

1708 Park Street | Alameda, California

In a crowded national arena of barbecue greats, Bay Area couple Fik and Reka Saleh carved out a space all their own with Alameda’s Fikscue . Indonesian cooking and Texas-style halal barbecue converge in the modest shop, where self-taught pitmaster Fik Saleh cuts slices of tender, wobbly brisket for customers after a 21-hour process of trimming, seasoning, and smoking. A brick wall that runs the length of the room holds a neon sign that reads, “ This must be the place ,” a nod to the Talking Heads classic. Indeed, many trek across the Bay Bridge from nearby San Francisco and wait up to two hours for mouthfuls of colossal beef dino ribs cut thick to order and sliced brisket prepared in a Texas-made 500-gallon smoker. There’s smoked chicken, too, and curls of beef sausages peppered with flecks of pickled jalapeño and pepper jack cheese. Reka Saleh steers the Indonesian comfort food offerings, like a brisket-laden rendang curry with kale; nasi goreng, or Indonesian fried rice, flavored with kecap manis and corned beef; and warming North Sumatran beef noodle soup, soto padang, that shakes up the well-worn barbecue genre and moves it out of its usual lane.

Frankie’s

169 Cherry Street | Burlington, Vermont

Frankie’s is like the Noah Kahan of restaurants — you know, the man who introduced the world to stick season ? Both the musician and Burlington’s hottest new table express their unabashed love for Vermont in a way that makes it impossible for the rest of us not to love it too. Frankie’s is the first solo project from co-owner and general manager Cindi Kozak and co-owner and chef Jordan Ware, who previously worked together at Hen of the Wood, a respected elder statesman of homegrown Vermont fare. At Frankie’s, which they refer to as simply “a Vermont restaurant,” the pair makes the case for Vermont in all its almost cliched Vermont-iness, goat cheese and creemees and all.

If not for the sign in the window, it’d be easy to mistake Frankie’s for a residential home whose owners love hosting dinner parties. The dining area is cozy and convivial, with customers tucked into seats in nooks and crannies or by the windows in the sunny front room. In the kitchen, Ware works with ingredients grown on nearby farms, combined with just enough quirks to remind diners that this isn’t the same old seasonal story. The menu does, nevertheless, change constantly: In May, it highlighted asparagus with blue crab, green garlic vinaigrette, and creme fraiche; in September, roasted oysters with poblano-shallot butter and pickled sweet corn. One consistent stunner: a steaming bowl of tender littleneck clams with piles of pickled zucchini and jalapeños (or poblano peppers, or chile flakes and almonds, or tomatoes, depending on the day) tucked into their shells. The dessert menu always features some version of the famous Vermont creemee made with whatever crop is at its peak, like corn and blueberries or lemon balm and rhubarb; and Kozak keeps the bar stocked with beers from sought-after Hill Farmstead Brewery that are otherwise nearly impossible to get outside of Greensboro, Vermont.

Good Hot Fish

10 Buxton Avenue | Asheville, North Carolina

At Good Hot Fish , nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the go-to move is the restaurant’s namesake: fried catfish dredged in local cornmeal served between thin slices of white bread with a generous dollop of tangy buttermilk tartar sauce. The sandwich — and the restaurant — are odes to the fish camps that once proliferated around Southern Appalachia as well as the “ badass fish-frying women ” of chef Ashleigh Shanti’s childhood in Virginia Beach.

Shanti first garnered national attention for bringing Affrilachian flavors to the menu at Asheville’s Benne on Eagle. At Good Hot Fish, where she is both owner and chef, she’s telling more of her story. The dining room proudly displays her parents’ collection of Jet magazines, black-and-white photography of Black Asheville, and cheeky paintings illustrated by her wife. The menu, full of twists on Southern staples, pulls inspiration from Black Appalachia as well as a bit of Japan, where her father used to travel for work. Instead of cornbread, Shanti offers a sweet potato okonomiyaki, which is every bit as comforting. She turns local steelhead trout into a slice of lunch meat for a riff on the classic bologna sandwich, griddled with translucent white onions, slices of American cheese, and a hit of mustard.

Ishtia

709 Harris Street | Kemah, Texas

Somehow, there are only a handful of Indigenous-focused restaurants in the United States, a fact that alone would make the 20-course tasting menu experience from Choctaw and Chickasaw chef David Skinner a worthy destination. But what Skinner is doing at Ishtia , in a bijou block within the outlying Southeast Texas city of Kemah, is so much more than just filling a gap.

Skinner pairs the meal with plenty of lessons in Indigenous foodways, including the demystification of Native cuisine as “foreign.” It starts on the second floor. Skinner sets the stage with a series of snacks, including a delicate corn sphere that resembles cured egg yolk, and a reading of a poem he wrote about the infamous Trail of Tears. Diners are then led through the kitchen, where slow-cooked tepary beans finish in clay pots over a blazing open fire, past an intricate map of the Indigenous communities of the Americas, and into the gently lit dining room adorned with dried berries and Native pottery. This is where the show truly begins.

It’s easy to find yourself surprised by — swooning over, even — dish after dish imbued with familiar spices grown across the Americas, such as star anise and sumac, presented in theatrical form. There’s tanchi labona, a deceptively simple Choctaw soup made up of nixtamalized corn and pork. A silky mole — a closely guarded combination of chiles, chocolates, and spices that has been simmering for months — is crowned with tender braised rabbit. The chef — who established his fluency in fine dining at nearby Thai-cum-Native American Th Prsv and his former immersive enterprise, Eculent — knows when to keep it playful, too. He clears the air with a tableside burning of white sage paired with a smudge stick salad that’s dredged in an earthy walnut-sumac pesto and tied together with stalks of chives.

Kisa

205 Allen Street | New York, New York

Many restaurants incorrectly think that the best way to grab attention is through flashy ingredients like uni and caviar: Not so. Perhaps the most radical thing a hot new restaurant can do in the year 2024 is have a straightforward menu with a clear point of view. In the case of New York City’s Kisa , simplicity is its superpower.

Here, David JoonWoo Yun and Steve JaeWoo Choi (two-thirds of the team behind the playful Noho restaurant C as in Charlie) along with Yong Min Kim intend to evoke the taxi driver restaurants of Korea, where affordability and speed are top priorities. And yet, while it’s possible to finish a meal in under an hour in the homey dining room on a Lower East Side corner, diners won’t feel part of any traffic rush as they dig into some of Manhattan’s most stellar Korean food outside of K-Town.

Mémoire Cà Phê

1495 NE Alberta Street | Portland, Oregon

Post-Vietnam War, the Vietnamese diasporic community dotted Portland with phở restaurants, bánh mì shops, and cafes selling cups of strong coffee sweetened with condensed milk. Now, a new generation is building a sizable scene of Vietnamese cafes , and Mémoire Cà Phê , where three of Portland’s buzziest restaurateurs have teamed up for the most ambitious crossover since the Avengers, is the paragon.

Before opening Mémoire, each of its co-owners was a star in their own right — Richard Le in his exploration of Việt Kiều, or “overseas Vietnamese” cuisine, at Matta; Kim Dam and her championing of Vietnam-grown coffee beans in specialty espresso drinks at Portland Cà Phê; and Lisa Nguyen with her mission to share cultural flavors through doughnuts and baked goods at Heyday.

At Mémoire on the busy restaurant row of Northeast Alberta, the trio draws equally from childhood memories (hence the name Mémoire, the French word for “memory”) and the collaborative strength forged through their friendship to serve Vietnamese-inflected brunch standards. Gluten-free fried chicken is served atop a chewy, fragrant pandan waffle. Fluffy biscuits are smothered with umami-rich fish sauce gravy. For the table, Nguyen’s black sesame cinnamon roll with marionberry jam is a treat that recalls both Cinnabon and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Dam supplies the brunch-time caffeine boost with drinks like cà phê sữa, or coffee with condensed milk, and coffee topped with silky egg cream or salted sweet cream.

Mirra

1954 W. Armitage Avenue | Chicago, Illinois

Chicago has a well-earned reputation as one of the country’s best cities for Mexican food. Here, chefs showcase locally grown Mexican ingredients and heirloom masa processed by Mexican immigrants. The most exciting new entry into the genre, Mirra , takes this formula and maps it onto the blueprint pioneered by Masala y Maiz, the landmark Mexico City restaurant that blends Mexican and Indian flavors without gimmickry.

Mexican and Indian fusion is nothing new — traditions date back to the Punjabi immigration waves to California in the early 1900s — and it’s a mix the owners of Masala y Maiz call “mestizaje,” a Spanish term referring to the melding of races and cultures. Mirra’s perspective makes for Midwestern mestizaje, adding a rustic regional gravitas while honoring the Chicago area’s Mexican and Indian populations — both of which rank as some of the largest in America. Its carne asada owes as much to Chicago’s legacy as a meatpacking hub as it does to its Mexican and Indian influences. Co-chefs Rishi Manoj Kumar and Zubair Mohajir wanted a thick-cut tribute to Chicago’s classic steakhouses, rubbed with Mexican chiles and served with baingan bharta, a smoky mashed eggplant. Kumar, who worked in the kitchens of celebrated chef Rick Bayless, and Mohajir, the chef from the Coach House , are Indian from different backgrounds. Mohajir grew up in Qatar, and Kumar in Singapore, and they bring both North and South Indian flavors together in a restaurant that already defies straightforward labels. The result is Indian Amul in Mirra’s roti quesadillas, and a smattering of fenugreek in the crispy roti shell of its scallop taco. Papads provide the vessel for the silkiest sikil pak in town.

Pascual

732 Maryland Avenue NE | Washington, D.C.

Past a sophisticated green facade in a residential part of Capitol Hill, chef Isabel Coss — among the best Mexican chefs in the country — has put together her most personal restaurant yet: Pascual , a polished celebration of her hometown, Mexico City. The restaurant’s dramatic, open-fire hearth takes center stage in a smallish dining room furnished with sleek wooden tables and a stark white bar lined with colorful bowls of fruit and mezcal bottles. And while the soulful fire-fed meats like lamb neck barbacoa and smoked chicken served with salsa morita will be seared into long-term memory, every dish on the compact, one-page menu reflects the diversity of Coss and her co-chef and husband Matt Conroy’s culinary backgrounds.

A meal may start with pickled jalapeño-flecked guacamole and salsas spinning around a lazy Susan. Moles come topped with caviar, and a masa-based roux nods to the French sauces they’ve mastered at D.C. sibling Lutèce. Coss, who got her start baking bread at Mexico City’s iconic Pujol at age 17 before going on to train at contemporary Mexican spots Empellón and Cosme in New York, flexes her pastry muscles with a grand finale of cinnamon sugar-dusted buñuelos. Each ingredient comes with a backstory, and the duo collaborates with local farmers to dress plates with Mexican specialties. Hoja santa leaves, grown on a local farm specifically for the restaurant, show up as a vessel for rice with salsa macha, in a garbanzo dish, and even in a creamy vanilla flan, adding an herbal kick to the classic dessert.

Sailor

228 Dekalb Avenue | Brooklyn, New York

Despite being billed as a simple neighborhood bistro, Brooklyn’s Sailor has been a destination since the day it opened: It represents the return of chef April Bloomfield to New York and the British-inflected cooking that made her name. Here, partnering with Gabriel Stulman, she shows off a sharpened point of view and an unfussy elegance, coaxing complex flavors from humble ingredients. There’s the glorious half-chicken, roasted with herb butter and served with Parmesan-crusted potatoes; the crispy sweetbreads with a lemony gribiche; and an intensely spicy ginger cake. Overtly and covertly, Bloomfield pays homage to the chefs who have inspired her by serving riffs on their recipes, such as Zuni Cafe’s anchovy with celery, and the unadorned vegetable sides a la Rita Sodi.

In other words, Bloomfield is at the top of her game at Sailor, which is notable considering that she spent several years in relative exile due to sexual harassment scandals at the Spotted Pig, where she was chef and co-owner; Bloomfield was criticized for not acting to stop the abuse by co-owner Ken Friedman. After making some personal changes , propelled by intensive therapy and getting sober, she’s entered a new round of her career, and diners are clamoring for a front-row seat.

Vinai

1300 NE Second Street | Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hmong food is, in chef Yia Vang’s own words, reflective of a people always traveling, always on the move — it draws on the Hmong people’s nomadic roots in the mountainous regions of Laos, Thailand, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Yet Vang’s new restaurant, Vinai, is also indelibly of a place: The Twin Cities, that is, which he’s helping to define as the capital of Hmong cuisine in the U.S.

Methodology

Credits

Editorial leads

Monica Burton, Lesley Suter

Creative director

Nat Belkov

Project manager

Jess Mayhugh

Contributors

Erika Adams, Brittany Britto Garley, Harry Cheadle, Dianne de Guzman, Justine Jones, Clair Lorell, Jess Mayhugh, Melissa McCart, Emma Orlow, Erin Perkins, Tierney Plumb, Rebecca Roland, Ashok Selvam, Janey Wong

Editors

Erin DeJesus, Kayla Stewart

Designer

Marcello Bevilacqua

Photographers

Ryan Belk, Josh Brasted, Chona Kasinger, Wonho Frank Lee, Dylan McEwan, Adam Milliron, Michelle Min, Celeste Noche, Oliver Parini, Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, Cole Saladino, Drew Anthony Smith, Garrett Sweet, Scott Suchman

Food stylist

Ana Kelley

Restaurant scouts

Monica Burton, Erin DeJesus, Bettina Makalintal, Amy McCarthy, Jaya Saxena, Lesley Suter

Copy editors

Nadia Q. Ahmad, Amanda Luansing, Catherine Sweet

Fact checker

Kelsey Lannin

Engagement editors

Zoe Becker, Kaitlin Bray, Frances Dumlao, E Jamar

Video team

Murilo Ferreira, Gabriella Lewis, Lucy Morales Carlisle, Stefania Orrù, Stephen Pelletteri, Connor Reid, Christine Ring

Special thanks

Nicole Albano, Lille Allen, Jill Dehnert, Patty Diez, Ryan Gantz, Allison Hamlin, Graham MacAree, Lauren Starke, Stephanie Wu, and the entire Eater Cities network