Restaurants in New York City

The Best New Bites at the Chelsea Market

Cuisine: | Featured in Best Of

Located in the old Nabisco factory, Chelsea Market is a glittering wonderland for gourmands (it should be, considering the landmarked building also houses the Food Network). But even if you can’t score a visit upstairs to hang with Alton Brown and Rachael Ray, a trip down the lower concourse is more than enough to keep your tastebuds occupied.

Q & A with Betony’s Executive Chef Bryce Shuman

Cuisine: American | Featured in Best Of

Three stars from The New York Times? Not bad for a chef no one heard of before, that is until he stepped into the kitchen at Betony this spring. He, along with Eamon Rockey, transformed what was once a doomed restaurant space, which briefly opened as a Russian brasserie called Pushkin’s into a midtown dining destination with sophisticated seasonal cooking sans the pretense that often comes with it.

Q & A with Atera’s Matthew Lightner

Cuisine: Modern | Featured in Chef Q&A

For a chef so new to the New York dining scene, Matthew Lightner has made quite an impressive, East Coast debut. An alumni of L’Auberge in California, Mugaritz in Spain, and Noma in Denmark to name a few, Lightner launched his first New York venture, Atera, in March of last year. And in just a short time, the avant-garde, modern American eatery has already garnered two Michelin stars, a spot on Bon Appetit’s Best 50 New Restaurants list, and a 3-star review from The New York Times.

Restaurant Spotting: The Backyard at The Pines

Cuisine: American | Featured in Restaurant, Restaurant Spotting, Summer Eats

A restaurant with outdoor space of any sort already has a leg up in the city, even if it’s only a pair of rickety two-top tables deposited on the sidewalk. So the full blown, leafy backyard at The Pines in Gowanus makes it an idyllic summertime spot, a sunny reprieve from the restaurant’s dim, no frills interiors. So while you can still hunker down indoors with tender Squab with Parsnip and Blueberry and house-cranked Cappellacci with Oxtail and Crab Brodo, be aware that visiting The Pines’ backyard means stepping into a different restaurant entirely. Because Romano has re-imagined the scruffy urban enclave as a charming Basque cider bar and grill, offering a unique menu of wood-fired items, prepared from a makeshift, backyard kitchen.

First Bite: Quality Italian

Cuisine: Italian | Featured in First Bite, Restaurant, Reviews

It’s refreshing to find a restaurant that doesn’t take itself too seriously. So many restaurants do, and who can blame them really? You invest a fortune into a space and concept, then pray it will succeed. That’s serious business… but it’s still just dinner. That’s exactly what I love about Quality Italian. It’s just plain fun. And the food happens to be excellent if you don’t take it too seriously. Sure, you could overanalyze their pie-shaped Chicken Parmigiana as being too cheeky. Like a pizza, it’s served in a pizza pan and sliced with a metal pizza cutter. Then, there’s the Baked Clams, which are topped not with the usual breadcrumbs, but strands of toasted Angel Hair Pasta & parsley, and finished tableside with a white wine butter sauce. Genius.

Q & A with Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Cuisine: Asian Fusion | Featured in Chef Q&A

Who doesn’t know the name Masaharu Morimoto? He was everyone’s favorite competitor on the original, Japanese cooking show, Iron Chef, and continues to be just as popular on its Food Network spinoff, Iron Chef America. Morimoto introduced the America to an entirely new brand of Asian fusion with his restaurant Morimoto (which currently has outposts in Philadelphia, Florida and NYC), dreaming up dishes like “Duck, Duck, Duck” — a trio of Peking-style duck leg, a duck egg, and a roast duck sandwich made with a foie gras-infused croissant — as well as Rock Shrimp Tempura, glazed in a sauce inspired by Buffalo Chicken Wings.

Drink Spotting: The Desert Shandy at Betony

Cuisine: American | Featured in Drink Spotting

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s good food to be found at Betony. After all, executive chef Bryce Shuman worked at one of the city’s preeminent fine dining institutions, Eleven Madison Park, for over five years. And like his EMP mentor, Daniel Humm, he doesn’t allow any of the details to escape his purview, from the homemade breadbasket (cheesy Frico & needle-thin Breadsticks, followed by piping hot Caraway Rolls with salted butter) to the perfectly curated cocktail list.

First Bite – Estela

Cuisine: American | Featured in First Bite, Restaurant, Reviews

Ignacio Mattos is an eccentric chef to say the least. In fact, being eccentric is what garnered him so much attention last year at Isa in Williamsburg. Remember Isa? It was a quirky eatery designed by Taavo Somer (Freeman’s Alley & Peels) with an oddball menu dreamed up by Ignacio Mattos, who once helmed the kitchen at il buco. But it was at Isa that he really turned heads, serving up dishes, like deep-fried sardine skeleton with olives and celery, or pickled chanterelles mingled with roasted pig’s ear under a tangle of arugula. With Mattos in the kitchen, Isa received a star from the New York Times, and more importantly, tons of attention for its curious, cutting edge cuisine. Then suddenly, Taavo Somer let go of the entire kitchen staff, including Mattos, changing the concept to casual Mediterranean. That was just over a year ago, but Mattos is officially back on the New York dining scene with Estela, a new Nolita eatery, located along Houston Street just above a dive bar named Botanica.

Q & A with Distilled’s Chef Shane Lyons

Cuisine: American | Featured in Chef Q&A

Despite a six-year tenure as a child actor, it would have been a surprise if Shane Lyons had become anything but a chef. Both of his parents are industry vets, and began teaching him how to cook at three years old. He eventually enrolled in the C.I.A, his mother’s alma mater, and became the youngest ever graduate at the age of 18. And this led to various respectable kitchen stints… first as a private chef, and then at restaurants like Craft Bar, Café Boulud and Momofuku Noodle Bar. But it’s at the recently opened Distilled that Lyons has achieved his ultimate goal, to become an executive chef and owner of a bustling New York eatery.

Sneak Peek: Corvo Bianco

Cuisine: Italian | Featured in First Bite, Restaurant, Reviews

Remind me not to go to a restaurant on opening night again. I know I probably should’ve known better, but I’ve been to plenty of thrilling opening nights. It’s a lot like attending a movie premiere or Broadway debut. There’s just something about being one of the first diners in the door, one of the first to see it all come together, to christen a new menu, and spy the chef on his or her brand new stage. As we all well know, it’s entirely risky to open a restaurant, a brave endeavor that too often ends in failur

Dish Spotting: Alder’s Rye & Pastrami Pasta

Cuisine: Modern | Featured in Dish Spotting

If you know anything about Wylie Dufresne and his original Lower East Side restaurant, wd-50, it’s hard not to enter his newest spot, Alder, with certain pre-conceived notions. But in reality, the two-month-old Alder represents a more sedate side of the chef, without being too buttoned up or self-serious. It starts with the restaurant’s back-to-nature name (Alder is a type of birch tree), which is also reflected in the rustic, rough-hewn décor… think ceilings made of reclaimed wood slates from a farmhouse in upstate New York. And while, like at wd-50, innocuously named dishes can yield unexpected surprises, none of the dishes at Alder are overwrought, overthought, or off-puttingly jokey or tricky.

Q & A with Alder’s Jon Bignelli

Cuisine: American | Featured in Chef Q&A, Chef Q&A Recipes

wd-50, Wylie Dufresne’s seminal, molecular gastronomy-loving eatery, is closely associated with all sorts of madcap, culinary experiments. After all, signature dishes include deconstructed Eggs Benedict with english muffin crumb-coated fried hollandaise, and Pizza “pebbles” made from a variety of dehydrated, tomato and parmesan flavored powders. So what can patrons expect from his new East Village restaurant, Alder? According to executive chef and wd-50 alum, Jon Bignelli, he and Dufresne have taken a decidedly more traditional (but no less fun and creative) approach to food.

Restaurant Spotting: Brooklyn’s Dinosaur Bar-B-Que

Cuisine: Barbecue | Featured in Restaurant, Sneak Peek

Almost a year and a half after it was first announced to the public, the newest outpost of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que has finally roared to life on Union Street in Brooklyn, straddling leafy Park Slope and industrial Gowanus. It’s really the perfect location for the rowdy restaurant — well enough removed from potentially put out residents on the other side of Fourth Avenue, and less than a half a block’s stumble to the subway.

Costata – Reviewed

Cuisine: Italian, Steakhouse | Featured in Hottest Newcomers, Reviews

How sweet it is! I bet that’s what Michael White is thinking right about now. How many chefs get to return to the very same space where they were once a young chef struggling to make a name for himself and come back as an owner with a legion of successful restaurants to show for himself? That about sums up the story of Costata. Anyone remember Fiamma, BR Guest’s upscale Italian, located in a townhouse on Spring Street just off Sixth Avenue? Michael White got his start in Fiamma’s kitchen. Over a dozen restaurants and eleven years later, White has returned to the former Fiamma space with an Italian steakhouse all his own called Costata, which means rib eye in Italian.

ABC Cocina – Reviewed

Cuisine: Latin, Mexican | Featured in First Bite, Reviews

Who would have thought one of the best places to eat right now is tucked inside a furniture and home store? But that’s exactly the case ever since ABC Carpet & Home first teamed up with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Dan Kluger to open ABC Kitchen. Over three years later and it’s nearly as hard to get a reservation at this seasonal and local American spot, tucked inside the 19th street side of the store.

Roberta’s Pizza

Cuisine: Pizzas | Featured in RG's Favorites

This place singlehandedly put Bushwick on the map and we’re not even exaggerating. So what’s the big deal? Killer pizzas, for starters, and then there’s the seasonal plates, many scattered with freshly picked ingredients from Roberta’s very own garden. The best part is you’d never know it from the outside… or the inside, for that matter. Step inside this dingy-looking, converted garage and you’ll feel like you’ve just entered some roadside bar with loud music playing, long wooden tables with benches, painted cement walls and twirling ceiling fans. You’ll probably be inclined to grab a beer, or even better, a cider and you should order something to pass the time while you wait for a table, which is par for the course these days.

What’s New On the High Line 2013

Cuisine: | Featured in Best Of

Known as the “park in the sky,” The High Line also happens to boast some serious eats to be had while taking in a just as serious view this summer. With a roster of food vendors offering everything from legitimate Texas-style barbecue to Mexican Paletas, gourmet Pretzels, Tacos, we could go on and on…

Q & A with Danji & Hanjan’s Hooni Kim

Cuisine: Korean | Featured in Chef Q&A

Having grown up in Manhattan, trained at the French Culinary Institute, and worked at two of the top, high-end eateries in the city (Daniel and Masa), it wasn’t a given that chef Hooni Kim would open a Korean restaurant. “I’ve always been more of a New Yorker than anything else. But I realized that at the best restaurants, chefs puts themselves onto the plate,” he says. “Once you eat their food, you should have an idea of who this person is, what they’re about and what their experiences are. “

North End Grill

Cuisine: | Featured in Uncategorized

Restaurant Spotting: Antica Pesa

Cuisine: Italian | Featured in Hottest Newcomers, Restaurant

Brooklyn’s own Berry Street is a somewhat unlikely location for the first stateside outpost of Antica Pesa, a 90-year-old restaurant situated in a former Vatican tollhouse in Trastevere. Because instead of being perfectly suited to shabby chic hipsters, the sleek new restaurant seems destined to follow in the path of its predecessor, becoming an out-of-the-way haven for the rich, famous and jet set (an image search yields twenty pictures of Madonna, Ashton Kutcher and Thomas Hardy, juxtaposed with delicately swirled plates of Cacio e Pepe).