Welcome to America’s Greatest and Gutsiest Food City

New York restaurants are a sport for the bold — one that rewards chefs brave enough to sign leases in the most expensive city in the country, as well as the diners who surrender to those chefs’ visions. It’s that tension, the crackle of will-I-love-it risk and reward, that fuels America’s best food city. Sure, Los Angeles has superior produce, Houston matches its diversity, and New Orleans speaks its own delicious patois, but when it comes to edge and evolution, baby, it’s New York, New York. 

The city’s newest restaurants innovate with swagger, even when they allude to the classics. The re-envisioned Le Veau d’Or may have a retro-chic, linoleum-lined dining room, but its finely calibrated martini (with a sherry highball on the side), gravity-defying fried potatoes, and lusty offal dishes remind diners how much verve we should demand from French cooking. Just as Penny, a downtown seafood counter, demonstrates how astonishing a perfect shrimp cocktail and a whole lobster with brown butter and all its glorious tomaley can be. Then there’s Hamburger America, a greasy-spoon temple to America’s greatest food, and San Sabino, where Don Angie chefs Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli have updated that underloved red sauce stalwart, shrimp parm.  

Lately, restaurants are surprising and delighting across neighborhoods. Brooklyn restaurateur Andrew Tarlow opened elegant, crowd-pleasing Borgo on the isle of Manhattan, bringing his crunchy fried delicata squash and brilliant beef ravioli to the borough. Hellbender delivers Cali-Mex sunshine — à la chamoy-dressed apples and cheesy fried shrimp tacos — at a former dive bar near the end of the M line in Queens. In Chinatown, French-leaning Bridges serves king crab with Béarnaise and a new-to-the-neighborhood kind of dumpling, soft little pockets filled with smoked eel and topped with horseradish. Nearby at Tolo, diners drink natty Burgundies with beef and broccoli, and Kisa, inspired by Seoul’s quick-turn restaurants for taxi drivers, dishes bulgogi on Houston, far from the city’s Korean center of gravity on 32nd Street. 

Pastry is the embodiment of New York City’s cross-cultural, rule-bending ethos. I’d argue that the crown jewel of the city’s pastry cases is pizza by the slice, for which lines form at the new West Village L’Industrie. Or perhaps the bagel and bialy, the former undergoing an extra-crispy renaissance at Apollo Bagels and the latter getting the garlic bread treatment at Elbow Bread Tortillerias, too, vie for supremacy: For the paper thin, lard-laced flour variety head to pop-up Border Town; for house-nixtamalized heirloom corn, go straight to Sobre Masa. And do save room for dessert at recently refurbished Kellogg’s Diner, a 24-hour joint with a touch of Tex-Mex flare, where plates of strawberry Jell-O pretzel salad and passion fruit tajín ice box cake await.  

New York’s pastry pros can also laminate dough with the best of them. 2024 Food & Wine Best New Chef Camari Mick — of the woman-run Musket Room, Raf’s, and Cafe Zaffri — crosses her croissants with Jamaican beef patties and fills her Wellington with curried goat. Laurel Bakery swirls cacio e pepe flavors into a spiral of croissant dough and wraps mortadella, pistachio, and pecorino into danishes. The king-sized pig in a blanket at Hani’s is a mighty fine consolation prize if the cinnamon rolls or maximally iced carrot cake sell out. 

You’ll drink extremely well here, too. Eel Bar is the city’s biggest vermouth booster, mixing the fortified wines into inventive preparados and an irresistibly “wet” martini. Legendary modernist barman Dave Arnold returned to the scene last year at Bar Contra, ushering in the revival of the Banana Justino and the introduction of a Rum and Coke without any rum or coke. At two-bars-in-one Sip & Guzzle, guests will find easygoing drinks (lychee ’tinis; sun-dried tomato daisies) upstairs and more conceptual cocktails (a clarified, Champagne-topped Grasshopper) in the basement. 

New York doesn’t just specialize in the flashy and new, so don’t overlook its icons. Eat a mutton chop at Keens, order cheese curds and a gimlet at The Long Island Bar, and get the old-school shrimp parm at Bamonte’s. (You know, just so you can compare.) 

But what the city really feeds us is the electric, the fresh, the daring. It’s tacos filled with stomach, snout, tail, and uterus at Carnitas Ramirez. It’s the exploration of queer food and wine on a tasting menu at Hags. And it’s the chutzpah of SEA, where a largely Korean kitchen team reinterprets Southeast Asian cooking and makes the city’s most profound crab fried rice. Hustle and reinvent on repeat: It’s the live or shut-your-doors code honored by the best restaurants in America’s greatest and gutsiest food city. 

To uncover the best food and drink experiences for travelers, Food & Wine polled over 400 chefs, travel experts, food and travel writers, and wine pros from across the globe for their top culinary travel experiences. We then turned the results over to our Global Advisory Board, who ranked the top nominees in each category. For the full list of all 165 winners, visit foodandwine.com/globaltastemakers.