The 10 Best New Restaurants in America, Ranked

For more than a decade, fine dining’s dominant aesthetic leaned rustic, evoking a sense of foraging in nature. Buddha Lo bucks that trend. The 33-year-old two-time Top Chef champ’s style leads you through a lush, manicured garden. At Huso, his platings are elegant, flavors subtle, and dining-room decor effortlessly chic. Tucked behind a hidden door in Marky’s Caviar’s Tribeca boutique, the restaurant features a French-inspired menu celebrating cured fish eggs—but doesn’t stop there. The seared scallop with morel and asparagus evokes spring, and the dry-aged duck with rhubarb is a little homage to the Aussie chef ’s experience at Eleven Madison Park. It makes for a stunning final savory course. 

Lamb lovers of the world will have to unite in order to eat the entirety of the massive and wonderful lamb-neck barbacoa at Isabel Coss and Matt Conroy’s Pascual. The married duo’s restaurant on Capitol Hill is a nod to Coss’s native Mexico City and the open-fire cooking the couple experienced while traveling through Oaxaca. The two-pound hunks of brined, grilled, and braised meat exemplify what makes this place great. Served with shaved onion, mint, and heirloom-corn tortillas, the dish is primal and unfussy, offering a deep lamb flavor that isn’t gamy. That mastery of taste is present across the seasonal menu, which recently included roasted oysters with brown butter and dark lager and Badger Flame beets with smoked apple, habanero, and feta. 

As chef Bill Jeong’s crispy jeon approaches the table, the generous shavings of bonito dance and flutter atop the savory seafood pancake that’s shot through with strands of scallions and coated with aioli. It’s an all-star dish at this modern Korean restaurant—an excellent melding of comfort and refinement. Any meal at Paju should start with the chips and dip, for which celeriac is ground and mixed with mouth-warming peppers, then topped with a creamy potato foam and served with celeriac rice crackers. And Jeong riffs on classics, taking recipes like sujebi, a hand-torn-noodle soup, and transforming it with a rich chun-jang Bolognese and slices of Korean pear that lighten the dish. Korean cooking has taken the world of fine dining by storm over the past decade, and this handsome, wood-paneled restaurant in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood is yet another exemplar of the cuisine. 

Penny has given itself no place to hide. The cooks at this long, narrow, raw bar–focused restaurant in the East Village are right there in front of you, behind the tasting counter that stretches the length of the space. And the food they’re preparing is straightforward, with no culinary pyrotechnics or cheffy tricks to cover for any shortcomings. But restaurateur Chase Sinzer and chef Joshua Pinsky execute it all with aplomb. Throughout a meal, it’s hard not to marvel at the little things, like how the shrimp on the seafood icebox is so immaculately cooked it makes you pause and wonder if you’ve been eating substandard shellfish your whole life. Or how the beans beneath the seafood sausage are prepared with such care that they’re perfectly creamy yet fully intact. Sinzer’s ample and considered wine list provides an outstanding complement to the menu. This is Pinsky and Sinzer’s second restaurant—a follow-up to their hit Euro bistro, Claud, in the basement below Penny—and it’s certainly not a sophomore slump. 

As an evening at Shōwa unfolds, a faint hint of fryer oil permeates the 20-seat dining room—and it’s a beautiful thing. The restaurant, a partnership between cofounders Joe Chang, the maître d’, and executive chef Koji Endo, offers a celebration of Japanese-style breaded and fried food unfurling across a 10- to 12-course tasting menu. The kaiseki-inspired experience begins with dishes that don’t touch the hot oil, including a miso-marinated fish and uni with bluefin- tuna tartare over rice. But the star of the show is the progression of katsu, or fried foods. When we visited, that included everything from greenling cod to tuna to dry-aged Duroc pork. Throughout the night, little accompaniments like cabbage and pickles bring crunch and acidity to the party, so that when you’re done, a meal consisting of fried food can still be aptly described as delicate, refined, and balanced. 

Is this place a bar? Is it a restaurant? Is it Parisian? Is it Middle Eastern? Does any of that matter if it’s just great? Chef-owner Michael Rafidi, chef de cuisine Nico Christiansen, wine director William Simons, and bar director Radovan Jankovic’s genre-defying La’ Shukran is a sultry little space with an eclectic menu that works as a spot to meet for drinks or a full-on dining experience. The whole concept began with Rafidi’s idea of serving escargots on hummus, and the result is as though Paris’s intimate, informal, creative “bistronomy” movement was given a heavy Levantine influence. The white asparagus is joined with goat-cheese curd, preserved lemon, and pistachio duqqa, while the quail is covered with Ramallah chili oil and accompanied by tahini ranch. And the cocktail menu follows a similar tack, with Jankovic crafting drinks with the anise-flavored spirit arak as well as other libations and ingredients such as urfa biber and kibbeh spice. 

Chef Ana Castro’s solo debut is something of a family affair. Castro originally moved to New Orleans to be closer to her little sister, Lydia, and now the two have joined forces. The siblings were born in Texas but raised in Mexico City, and in New Orleans they’re celebrating seafood in a way befitting a Big Easy restaurant. It just happens to be one of America’s great Mexican restaurants, too. After all, Acamaya is Spanish for “crawfish.” Dishes like chochoyotes—supple masa dumplings akin to gnocchi that come bathed in a seasonal sauce and mixed with crab—reference their grandmother’s cooking. Other creations, such as the tuna tostada with charred avocado, peanut, and nori, connect to Mexico’s melting pot of cultures, in this instance the Japanese influence on Baja California’s cuisine. But Castro isn’t punching you in the face with flavor; her style is subtle and sublime. 

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Chefs Kevin Fink and Tavel Bristol-Joseph have spawned a mini-empire in Austin—and a thread that has run through much of their work is an exploration of the bounty of Texas meat, grains, and produce. Now, in their most ambitious project to date, they’ve created a series of restaurants and marketplaces under one roof that celebrate the Lone Star State. Pullman Market follows in the footsteps of Eataly before it, but this complex’s concepts are so much more distinct and delicious than anything that forebear has offered. You can spend day and night just eating your way through the place. The morning can kick off with pastries baked in-house or breakfast tacos using bacon from the butcher around the corner and tortillas made fresh on the other side of the food hall. Lunch might be pizza and pasta made from local heritage grains at Fife and Farro. Dinner may steer toward Sonoran-style cuisine at Mezquite or the seasonal, wood-fired Texas beef at Isidore. And, in the most interesting twist of all, you can skip straight to a tasting-menu experience devoted entirely to dessert at the chef’s counter Nicosi. 

It may be hard to find a more virtuosic chef in America than Aitor Zabala. As one Michelin three-star chef once told us, with awe in their voice, “He’s an artist.” The El Bulli alum brings the exacting skills he honed at the mecca of modernist cuisine to his 14-seat tasting counter—but his culinary vision is far more grounded than the molecular gastronomy of the aughts and 2010s. Amid the parade of courses, there’s beautiful plating and masterful technique: In one dish, a healthy quenelle of caviar is perched upon an impossibly light dashi meringue shaped like a fish. But Zabala’s wizardry never overshadows deliciousness, a balance exemplified by the outstanding shiso tempura topped with beef tartare and covered in borage flowers. And the final savory course reflects a chef who knows when to embrace simplicity and let his ingredients speak. It’s an homage to txuleton beef served in Spain, with steak from a seven-year-old cow grilled and paired with Zabala’s riffs on piquillo peppers. 

Stepping out of the car in Miami’s Little River neighborhood and onto a street lined by low-slung unmarked buildings with seemingly no restaurant in sight, it’s hard not to think you’ve taken a wrong turn. But the crowd gathering outside an ivy-covered wall while G-Wagens and Range Rovers come and go around them reassure you that you’re in the right place. Cross the threshold and you’re transported to a new world. The courtyard is anchored by a lush banyan tree, and a resplendent Art Deco dining room and bar encircle the boisterous patrons outdoors. 

Inside, the vibes are immaculate. But here’s the problem with so many restaurants this fun: The food can almost feel like an afterthought to the ambiance. That’s not the case at Sunny’s. Chef Aaron Brooks and team execute a modern steakhouse menu with care. The beef is cooked over a live-oak fire; the raw seafood is gorgeous; platonic ideals of sides like creamed spinach emerge from the kitchen; ethereal Parker House rolls with honey butter are far from filler; and pastas such as agnolotti with corn and blue crab swimming in a saffron broth could entice you to skip the steak altogether. This is how Miami does a steakhouse. But we’d welcome this restaurant anywhere.