25 Years Of New York City Dining

A timeline of major food moments – restaurant openings, innovations, fads, pop culture cameos, blackouts and bans – that changed life in New York City in the first quarter of the 21st century.

2000

Considering the lines those cupcakes would draw for years, you’d think Magnolia Bakery was featured weekly on Sex and the City. But it’s just a 76-second pink-frosted aside.

To dine out after Anthony Bourdain’s game-changing book is to think in Bourdainisms: never order sushi on a Monday. If you eat the free bread, just know it’s been passed between tables all night. And everyone involved in making your brunch hates brunch. But even so, the book makes being a chef seem cool in a way nothing else had.

2001

Craft Made Vegetables Sexy

Long before starring on Top Chef, Tom Colicchio spent a decade putting Gramercy Tavern on the map and redefining modern restaurant dining at Craft. New York’s luxury edition of California classics like Chez Panisse and Zuni Café, Craft was a major source of the 21st century’s rush of restaurants with farm-to-table menus, moody lighting and Chilewich place mats. (It was also an early home to acclaimed chefs like David Chang, Jonathan Benno, Marco Canora and the influential pastry chef Karen DeMasco.)

Before Craft, a fine-dining chef’s job consisted mainly of inventing elaborate sauces, sides and swirls to plate around expensive proteins. But in Colicchio’s world, diners composed their own meals. They started with heritage pork chops and day-boat scallops from one section of the menu, and paired them with precious Union Square Greenmarket produce like a whole roasted hen-of-the-woods mushroom or a bowl of fresh spring peas, from another. Soon enough, diners and restaurants all over the country adopted this approach, and Craft came to define quiet luxury before the term existed. – JULIA MOSKIN

The DB burger at Daniel Boulud’s DB Bistro Moderne – a swanky turducken of ground sirloin, short rib, foie gras and truffles – becomes the standard-bearer of the high-end burger movement. The $27 price tag is almost quaint today.

“New York has many bars and restaurants with views of the city. Windows on the World was something else, a restaurant that seemed suspended halfway between the earth and the moon.” – William Grimes in The New York Times

2002

From Flushing to Chinatown to the East Village, boba tea washes over the city. Two decades on, it’s bigger than ever.

2003

Bar and restaurant owners (and dry cleaners) panic as a ban on smoking takes effect that critics call a death knell for many businesses.

“When California banned smoking, no one paid attention.” – Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to New York magazine

A brush fire near power lines in Ohio causes a chain reaction that cuts power to New York and much of the Northeast on August 14. Restaurants raid their walk-ins to unload as much food as possible during the blackout before it spoils in the summer heat.

WD-50 Conjured Better Eating Through Chemistry

When Wylie Dufresne opened WD-50, he had already made his mark at 71 Clinton Fresh Food with a flashy style of cooking: witty, borderline outlandish, surprisingly seductive. WD-50 – the name fused his initials and the restaurant’s address at 50 Clinton Street – put the creative engine into overdrive. Dufresne made the leap from chef to alchemist, incorporating products, techniques and ingredients normally associated with industrial food production, and establishing himself as a pioneer in the movement that came to be known as molecular gastronomy, personified by chefs like Heston Blumenthal in Britain, Ferran Adrià in Spain and Grant Achatz in Chicago. His radical interventions into flavours and textures yielded innovations like pickled beef tongue with cubes of deep-fried mayonnaise, a wildly deconstructed eggs Benedict, and tofu purée, fortified with methylcellulose, that turned into noodles when squeezed into hot broth. WD-50 was a laboratory of invention throughout its decade-long run. — WILLIAM GRIMES

How does a spot that serves only one dish, let alone rice pudding, survive in Lower Manhattan? A $22-million-a-year gambling ring may have helped.

2004

The Midtown French giants Lutèce, La Caravelle and La Côte Basque shutter, all in one year, and with that the sauced and coiffed luncheons of the 1960s and ’70s pass into Capote-era lore.

The San Francisco-based website Yelp expands to New York (the first review: Wild Ginger on Grove Street). Helmed by former PayPal employees with millions in backing, the site permanently shifts the diner-restaurant relationship – for better or worse.

Masa Changed the Sushi Game

“The first sentence is, my restaurant is expensive.” This was how Masa Takayama summed up the blizzard of press that attended the opening of his cloistered sushi-ya above Columbus Circle. The clips were right. The price of entry, $300 before tax, was the highest of any restaurant in the city at the time. It climbed steadily from there, making all the dozens and dozens of sushi counters that came in Masa’s wake seem affordable by comparison. Takayama wasn’t the first to bring the rapid-fire delights of omakase dining to Manhattan. But his lavish use of foie gras, caviar and truffles, and his skill at bundling vast amounts of pleasure into each small course, helped convince New Yorkers that dining at a counter could be just as serious and luxurious as sitting at a table shrouded under white linen.

And while Masa didn’t exactly make it cool to eat in malls, the simple fact of its presence down the hall from Per Se on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center (now Deutsche Bank Center) acted as proof of concept for the notion that the right restaurant could turn a real estate development into a destination. All this may seem obvious now, but it wasn’t in 2004. – PETE WELLS

Taavo Somer starts his Freemans mini-empire – and the taxidermy wave of the 2000s – from an alley on the Lower East Side. Which Olsen twin is at that table?

2005

Before the word “mixology” is used only ironically, Employees Only and Pegu Club (and later PDT, Death & Co and so many others) start the cocktail renaissance.

New Yorkers, who should know better, habitually wait in excessive lines for frozen yogurt at Pinkberry, Red Mango and Yolato.

Xi’an Famous Foods opens its first location, in Flushing, Queens, giving birth to a local chain that will introduce many to Northern Chinese flavours and their new spicy hand-pulled-noodle habit.

2006

New York food blogs and message boards – Chowhound, eGullet, etc – had been around since the ’90s and early aughts. But the obsessive, granular restaurant news era arguably starts when Grub Street debuts in 2006 and its editor, Josh Ozersky, aims to post news every hour. Eater, itself just a year old, immediately and gleefully mocks him when he can’t keep up the pace.

Momofuku Ssam Bar Ignored the Rules

I left more than a few of the restaurants that I reviewed past midnight. But arriving then?

That was peculiar to Momofuku Ssam Bar. But then Ssam Bar was all peculiarities.

Unlike other chefs of his talent and ambition, David Chang served his whole menu into the wee hours. Unlike other menus, Chang’s was an intentionally mixed message: snacks that you ate with your fingers beside hunks of meat for which a cleaver was in order; hoisin sauce for a pork bun but Romesco for a hanger steak; one dish that pointed toward Italy and another with a Japanese compass.

Unlike other restaurants in Manhattan’s brutal economy, Ssam Bar didn’t have any set ideas about how much you’d spend or how long you’d stay. Leave after 30 minutes and a $30 bill. Crest two hours and $200 if the backless stools and loud music didn’t get to you.

Unlike, unlike, unlike. That was Ssam Bar’s goal and soul – to dispense not merely with reservations but with rules. Also to feed you better than a restaurant with triple its airs and a third of its ingenuity. It was a sensation in its day. It was a revolution in retrospect. — FRANK BRUNI

After lines run into the two-hour range at the original Shake Shack location in Madison Square Park, Danny Meyer installs a webcam so would-be lunchers can check their chances – and abandon hope – from their desks.

2007

The barbecue wave hits New York, with pit spots like Blue Smoke, Daisy Mays, Hill Country and Fette Sau joining the herd. Are they as good as the original articles from Austin, Texas, or Memphis, Tennessee? They’re definitely closer.

Always ahead of the curve, New York City becomes the first major city to restrict trans fats in restaurants. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is accused of running a “nanny state” (says the New York Post: City’s Big Fat Flop), but a national ban follows 12 years later.

“If a chef dares to offer something as unappealing as, say, a raw kale salad, chances are it’s fantastic,” writes Melissa Clark about a dish at Franny’s in Park Slope. The kale craze spins out from there.

2008

The irrepressible Florent Morellet closes his namesake restaurant after the rent goes up to more than $30,000 a month, and the spirit of the old meatpacking district dims a little more. The space becomes a Madewell.

At Milk Bar, the cereal milk of childhood dreams is made real and frozen (back when calling a dessert “crack pie” seemed acceptable).

Roberta’s Redefined Brooklyn Dining

It’s hard to imagine a New York City without flame-kissed Neopolitanish pizzas eaten by young people in fashionable, distressed clothing who will later smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk before swiping right and heading off into the night. Roberta’s, which opened in a heatless cinder-block garage in Bushwick in 2008, made all that possible.

Here they were then: women in rompers and men in paint-spattered Dickies, skateboarding bass players, dreadlocked fabric artists, the occasional cool-kid lawyer or code-writing hipstercrat, all of them crowded into this Christmas-lighted lodge to eat pizzas of no particular provenance beyond the delicious. You could get a Hawaiian pie adorned with paper-thin sheets of ripe pineapple, shredded ham, sliced jalapeños and dabs of ricotta cheese, or a red-sauced pie with Italian tuna, capers and red onions, a mozzarella one with DIY guanciale and a single runny egg. You could drink a lot of beer, eating those. In summer, you could dance on the deck, as if no one was watching, though everyone was.

Roberta’s at the start was a craft party for the artistically inclined, a place to wind up as much as wind down, sweaty with promise and excitement. And for a few years there was absolutely no place like it in the five boroughs. – SAM SIFTON

To make snagging a table more democratic – imagine that – David Chang introduces an online reservation system at Momofuku Ko. A secondary market immediately emerges.

“The whole goal was so that we didn’t have to answer the phone, so we could be automated. But now we have this whole problem with reservation scalping.” – David Chang to The New York Times

Lehman Brothers collapses overnight, sending reverberations through the financial system. As staffers stream out onto the street, file boxes in hand, expense accounts disappear and the economy of the city seizes up. Like millions of Americans, New York restaurants feel the Great Recession for years afterward.

2009

For many devoted epicureans, time stops when Condé Nast shutters Gourmet magazine. (Bon Appétit survives.) Staffers reportedly abscond with all the booze in the office and head to the editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl’s apartment to drink their sorrows away.

Lobster roll mania washes up in New York. Red Hook Lobster Pound, Luke’s Lobster and a guy slinging crustaceans from his Greenpoint apartment all get in on the action.

2010

Torrisi Italian Specialties Was Major

I know a few boomers who talk about the time they saw Bruce Springsteen play a college gym before his band got big. I know one who says he gave Jean-Michel Basquiat $5 for a postcard on Prince Street one night in 1979, another who says he started in with Raymond Carver when Carver was still writing for his college literary magazine out at Humboldt State.

Their stories are nostalgic, sepia-toned, but no less thrilling for that. What a thing to see the future in the present, something big when it is still small, still forming, all promise.

Generation X got, among other things, Torrisi Italian Specialties, a tone poem about Italian American cooking that opened on Mulberry Street in Manhattan at the very end of 2009 and closed five years and one day later. The owners were Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, New York cooks from Café Boulud who’d met in culinary school and shared a singular dream. It wasn’t to run a restaurant with fewer than 20 seats.

But how great it was when they were doing just that. Their Major Food Group would come along soon enough with Carbone and Dirty French and exclusive clam bars, private clubs and black Escalades out front. Before all that it was no reservations and wait your turn for food that was landscape-changing and American-born: salami toast spread thick with baccalà and cured lemon; sweet ravioli with a tang of red wine vinegar and the low hum of salty chicken liver; crisp Long Island duck skin over buttery fat and ruddy meat; a tart grapefruit icey; a plate of perfect Italian cookies. This was amazing to experience. As the man in the only photograph in the restaurant sang, “Only the good die young.” – SAM SIFTON

Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich open Eataly, a 50,000-square-foot Italian market housing seven restaurants, four food stands, a rooftop beer garden and a cooking school. (It also has groceries.)

2011

After Marcus Samuelsson makes his name at Aquavit, everyone flocks to his Harlem restaurant, Red Rooster.

On any given weekend at Smorgasburg, the food-centric extension of Brooklyn Flea on the Williamsburg waterfront, legions of hipsters (what we call Nolita dirtbags today) line up for Japanese raindrop cakes and ramen burgers.

2012

The next summer, food shortages, long lines and leftover trash make the Great GoogaMooga our Fyre Festival.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New York takes stock of the devastation. Hundreds of restaurants languish for days awaiting power to return below 39th Street.

2013

“What are you standing in line for?” is the inevitable question from passersby at Dominique Ansel’s Spring Street bakery. Cronuts, of course. The virtuosic viral pastry spawns countless dupes: cruffins, doissants, crullants and even, um, scronuts.

Tao, the original modern clubstraurant, takes its models-and-bottles worldview to the meatpacking district, and the neighbourhood’s transformation is complete.

2014

What’s the difference between just a picture of food and “food porn”? Well, you know it when you see it. And you start seeing it every time you open your Instagram feed: diabolically garnished milkshakes, intricate açai bowls, a sushi burger (yes, rice is the bun). A rainbow bagel actually starts to look reasonable when you’ve just scrolled past rainbow burgers, rainbow grilled cheese and rainbow fries.

Via Carota Gathered The Modern Village

Via Carota, the effortlessly chic and popular Italian restaurant on Grove Street, is Greenwich Village today in a ramekin of Castelvetrano olives. Loving it is almost a religion in elite food circles.

Decades ago, through the windows of my boyhood apartment in the Village, I watched when a predecessor, Da Silvano, the now-shuttered Northern Italian trattoria, opened across the street. Like other native Villagers back then, I grew up on a diet of fried zucchini sticks and stuffed cannelloni at red-sauce restaurants like Mona Lisa and Gran Ticino.

They, like the tenement buildings whose ground floors and basements they often occupied, represented a crucial but fading chapter in the neighbourhood’s cultural history: the Village as an immigrant, still partly working-class, melting pot. But Da Silvano began serving Milanese tripe and Tuscan pastas to a tonier, globe-trotting, art-dealing clientele. Its arrival betokened a more gentrified, sanitised Village – a place of $73 million townhouses and celebrity brunches.

Via Carota is the unofficial clubhouse for the current crowd, the love child of Jodi Williams and Rita Sodi, serving not culinary fireworks but reliable Tuscan classics. Relaxed but refined, it takes few reservations. Big windows and outdoor tables advertise an openness to the neighbourhood that brings to mind the old cafes along MacDougal Street. It is a kind of heaven – if you have the hours to wait for a table and can afford a $24 grilled artichoke.

The other day I grabbed an empty stool at the marble bar and ordered lunch: a plain green salad and the restaurant’s famous, bunless burger. Simple as it gets.

I miss the old Village, but I don’t think I’ve had a more satisfying meal in years. – MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Remember when you could just call a restaurant and ask nicely for a table and nicely be promised one? That pleasantry starts to end on June 8, 2014, when Resy launches itself against the ramparts of the OpenTable juggernaut and the reservation-platform wars began. Now you’re up at midnight trying to get a table for 5pm on a Tuesday in the next fiscal quarter. The situation gets so bad, the New York state legislature has to step in.

Having already achieved “Big in Japan” status, ramen chef Ivan Orkin opens Slurp Shop in Gotham West Market in 2013 and follows it with his Ivan Ramen, transplanted from Tokyo. According to Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, Orkin colours “outside the lines of Japanese cuisine” – just one exemplar in a city full of ramen obsessives.

2015

The Four Horsemen Served Natural Cool

On my first trip to the Four Horsemen, in the summer of 2015, I tasted a glass of weird, wonderful grenache from the French winemaker Olivier Cohen and ate Nick Curtola’s brilliant roast chicken over a jumble of apricots and toasted bread. I still remember the chilled fromage blanc for dessert. All around me, a generation of hip Brooklyn parents in uniforms of faded T-shirts and distressed denim seemed to be popping in and simultaneously developing a taste for the volcanic terroir of Mount Etna and mourning the grimy old days of Williamsburg over pork terrines.

The natural wine bar as a genre, along with all of its clichés, wasn’t so established here, and it would have been easy to miss what made the place so special: the Four Horsemen was a genuinely enthusiastic and carefully designed little bar with excellent food that completely underplayed its own pleasures. Sure, one of the owners was LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, but the Four Horsemen didn’t unfold as a celebrity vanity project. A decade in, you’ll find it’s only more delicious and more precise – if you can wangle one of its impossible reservations. — TEJAL RAO

Real heads will point to Kozmo.com, but the serious boom in delivery services hits with Postmates, DoorDash and UberEats. Food-by-bike to your door is certainly not novel to New Yorkers, but the service fees are.

Danny Meyer eliminates tipping at Union Square Hospitality restaurants, and it seems like a harbinger of a fairer future for service workers. Instead, the effort crumbles under the weight of worker dissatisfaction and legal complications, and finally ends during the pandemic.

If you called for a reservation at Polo Bar then, you might have a table by now.

Queens Night Market Welcomed the World

Half a century ago, Times restaurant critic John L. Hess gave four stars to all of Chinatown, a decision that was less about the specific pleasures of its restaurants than about how the neighbourhood brimmed with possibility. One could say the same about the Queens Night Market, where any given night might bring a parade of Jamaican curry goat, Burmese tea leaf salad, Afghan pulao, Colombian arepas and Transylvanian chimney cakes roasted on a spit.

In 2015, John Wang abandoned his career in law to create a new (for New York) kind of dining experience, one modelled after Asia’s clamorous night markets, which function as both gathering places and bazaars. For the site, he chose Queens, home to some of the most exciting food in the city and yet long sidelined in coverage of the dining scene. Like New York itself, the market had room for everyone: Wang recruited vendors with roots from around the world, many of them first-time entrepreneurs, and appealed to corporate sponsors to keep fees low. Almost every dish was capped at $5, making it affordable for visitors to graze from booth to booth. – LIGAYA MISHAN

2016

Venture capital ventures into New York with David Chang’s Maple delivery service, ClassPass’ lunch venture, MealPass and the ubiquity of Impossible burgers on restaurant menus.

Long before the protein bros, bone broth has a moment, set in motion by Marco Canora’s East Village window, Brodo. Don’t even think about calling it stock.

2017

The Spotted Pig Became Dining’s #MeToo Symbol

The Spotted Pig created the formula for countless West Village restaurants that came later, with its pubby vibe, mix of downtown diners and haute comfort menu. Chef April Bloomfield’s destination burger – with Roquefort, no substitutions – helped the place win a Michelin star. Of course, the burger isn’t the source of the restaurant’s enduring notoriety.

It was not the only star-studded New York restaurant where the staff was routinely abused and harassed. But, after a 2017 investigation by The New York Times, it was the first to be investigated by New York state’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the restaurant was found to have violated employees’ human rights and ordered to pay restitution. The owner, Ken Friedman, abruptly closed the Spotted Pig on January 24, 2020.

In the Spotted Pig’s heyday, Friedman’s high-profile regulars filled the room – including Mario Batali, an investor in the restaurant who was opening his own places as fast as adoring fans could fill them. Friedman and Bloomfield eventually opened seven more restaurants together. But behind the scenes in their and Batali’s empires, kitchen workers and wait staff endured years of sexual harassment, verbal abuse and retaliation. When #MeToo began, a group of female Spotted Pig employees banded together on Facebook and brought their stories to the Times. Together, they helped end the era in which women in hospitality simply accepted harassment by powerful men as part of the job. — JULIA MOSKIN

2018

If you’re going to build a neighbourhood (Hudson Yards) from scratch, it’s going to need restaurants. Somebody get José Andrés on the phone.

The Salt Bae restaurant Nusr-Et must have sounded like a good idea at some point, but the run-into-the-ground video of founder Nusret Gokce turns out to be an insufficient basis for a business. The burger-forward follow-up, which advertises free vege burgers for women, also proves unsuccessful.

2019

Many would argue that the Four Seasons, storied birthplace of the power lunch, actually closed when the restaurant was booted from its iconic home in the Seagram Building in 2016. But two years later, its operators, Julian Niccolini and Alex von Bidder, attempt a relaunch. After 10 months, and a raft of #MeToo accusations that force Niccolini to resign, it closes for good.

Whether it’s a once-in-lifetime tasting menu at Atomix, the inventive fine-dining of Jungsik or the modern Korean steakhouse experience at Cote, New York is a hotbed of Korean culinary innovation. Writes Pete Wells, “Outside South Korea, Manhattan is the best place to experience alternate visions of Korean cuisine.”

E-Bikes E-verywhere. A vast armada of lithium-ion-powered delivery daredevils turns the streets of the city into an IRL game of Frogger.

2020

When life in New York City comes to a shuddering halt in the early days of the pandemic, the city takes on an eerie silence, punctuated far too often by the wail of sirens. After a weekend of uncertainty, Mayor Bill de Blasio officially orders restaurants and bars across the five boroughs to pivot to delivery and takeout, putting thousands out of work overnight. Ultimately, every kind of restaurant – from fine-dining institutions to neighbourhood lunch counters – is forced to lay off staff and hope there will be a restaurant to reopen later.

“Our lives are all changing in ways that were unimaginable just a week ago. This is not a decision I make lightly. These places are part of the heart and soul of our city.” – Mayor Bill de Blasio, March 15, 2020

Gabrielle Hamilton closes her small-but-mighty Prune. The downtown Bloody Mary brunch crowd is still searching for a new spiritual home.

Burritos lowered from fire escapes, cereal made of actual tiny croissants, viral pizza pop-ups – no idea is too out there or too obvious during the uncertain first years of the pandemic. Bars are forced to sell food to remain open, and restaurants start throwing things at the wall: fresh bread pickups, to-go cocktails, mini-grocery stores, Parisian streetside dining and everything in between.

2021

Semma Scaled the Heights of Flavour

New York City has a long history of great Indian food, though restaurants that went beyond the mild, butter-chicken-and-naan standards were rare. Then came Unapologetic Foods, the restaurant group that blew the doors wide open, starting with Adda, a brazen ode to Indian food in its vivid, spice-laden glory. Dhamaka, which explored lesser-known regional dishes, followed. And then there’s Semma. Run by Vijay Kumar, a soft-spoken chef from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the West Village restaurant has ushered in a tidal wave of regional Indian cuisine, particularly from the south. Kumar’s flavours, which crisscross the region and make liberal use of coconut, mustard seeds and chiles, are loud yet restrained, unassuming but long-lasting. He doesn’t just serve a dosa; he serves the city’s best dosa: a feat of technical finesse, with crisp, ghee-enriched edges giving way to a soft underside that’s heady with the funk of fermentation and swiped with nutty, thrillingly fiery gunpowder spice. The arrival of Semma was a proclamation that Indian cuisine does not need elevation. This food is elevated just as it is. – PRIYA KRISHNA

By 2021, New York City is no stranger to the saucy red pleasures of birria. But the dish’s sudden popularity on TikTok gives way to a wave of birria mash-ups, including birria empanadas, birria ramen and even birria pizza.

Eleven Madison Park takes a bold step into entirely plant-based territory (beets instead of duck) as chef Daniel Humm declares, “The current food system is simply not sustainable.” The restaurant continued to serve beef, though, in the private dining room.

“It’s some kind of metaphor for Manhattan, where there’s always a higher level of luxury, a secret room where the rich eat roasted tenderloin while everybody else gets an eggplant canoe.” – Pete Wells, 2021

2022

Tatiana Perfected Gotham Gourmet

At Tatiana, the buzzy restaurant in Lincoln Center, chef Kwame Onwuachi draws on his heritage, which he describes as Afro-Caribbean-by-way-of-the-Bronx. I also grew up in New York, and his menu, which I consumed to a soundtrack of hip-hop tracks by French Montana and Notorious B.I.G., sent me on a journey down memory lane.

Biting into flaky-crusted pastry stuffed with robustly seasoned goat meat reminded me of empanadas, samosas and even the beef patties from the hot, narrow pizza place I’d visit after school – minus the semi-stale, reheated quality I tolerated as a teen.

The swipe of curried honey butter that accompanied the airy cornbread had me thinking about college days squeezed inside Indian joints on East Sixth Street, with live sitar players in the windows. Then there were delicate slices of hamachi layered against fresh avocado – a minimalist, fresh-tasting twist on the snapper escovitch I’d had a plate of one year on Eastern Parkway during the West Indian American Day Parade.

But Tatiana’s tender, braised oxtails, bites of which practically dissolve on my tongue, are the star of the menu. I had to reconsider any oxtails I’d previously had, which were usually piled inside a Styrofoam box, smushed up against some mac and cheese. Tatiana’s are downright indulgent, served sitting in a thick, sticky-sweet reduction that sent warmth radiating from my belly to my bones. They are, as they say, grown and sexy. That may be Onwuachi’s real secret sauce: with the flair of a legendary music producer, he creates remixes with the cool swagger and unique style you can only get in New York. – DODAI STEWART

Google Maps identifies the micro-neighbourhood Dimes Square, named after a restaurant (that isn’t even the best on the block).

Brooks Headley moves Superiority Burger, home of his vegetarian wizardry – the signature burger, a collard-greens sandwich, the Sloppy Dave – around the corner to the former Odessa Restaurant space.

2023

If not for the rise of the gossip site Deuxmoi, non-New Yorkers might never have heard of restaurants like Via Carota, the Corner Store or Casa Cipriani. But here we are: exclusive restaurants and their exclusive clientele are on constant display, driving a secondary market of diners eager to sit in a chair that may have hosted the backside of Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce.

With crispy pepperoni cups, cartoon-toothpaste ricotta squiggles and cheese-filled ravioli on steak, Bad Roman emerges as the final boss of made-for-social-media restaurants.

Stoolies take cover under cardboard cutouts of Dave Portnoy’s head as the skies open up over the One Bite Pizza Festival. Perhaps it’s a sign?

2024

The world’s largest Din Tai Fung opens in a hallowed space: the former home of Mars 2112.

Gotham West Market, a 10,000-square-foot food hall in Hell’s Kitchen, finally closes after losing stalls like Ivan Ramen and Corner Slice in 2020 and operating at half-capacity.

TikTok use in the US peaks during the pandemic, but remains a double-edged sword for food businesses: with a few million views, your restaurant could take off. Alternatively, your Swedish candy well could run dry, or the line for your sourdough bagels could get you evicted.

2025

Whether it’s a Pastis in Miami, a Black Tap Burgers and Beer in Singapore, a Carbone in Dallas, an STK in Salt Lake City or Dominique Ansel on the Las Vegas Strip, some of the biggest stars of millennial New York continue to live their best, or at least their second, lives far outside the city.

New York has never wanted for interpretations of French comfort fare, but the latest crop of neo-bistros – Le Veau d’Or, Le Tete d’Or, Jean’s, Chez Fifi and Zimmi’s – are among the hottest spots in the city. Are they imaginative? Not excessively. Is a $65 French dip a sustainable lifestyle choice? Too soon to tell. Do diners love them? Just try getting a table.

“Most of what chefs create is destroyed a few minutes later. There’s no way to experience a meal that was cooked 20 years ago. But if you were there, you can tell somebody what it was like.” – Pete Wells, 2024

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Photographs by: Karsten Moran, Tony Cenicola, Ramsay de Give, Evan Sung, Robert Wright, Hiroko Masuike, Brent Herrig, Kevin Hagen and Jonathan Zizzo

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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