New York's 21 Best Dishes of 2024
Demo's lobster au poivre, Sukh's garlic waffles, beef cheek hummus at Sawa, Eel Bar's burger, and the city's other top new dishes
Holiday Special! We’re still massively discounting yearly subscriptions, a savings of nearly $90 over the monthly rate! Most of our year-end coverage is paywalled.
Last week, I published my annual list of the year’s best new restaurants — alongside short essays on the state of Modern Mexican fare and the second Trump presidency.
This week, I’m going to be a little more direct. This is my list of the year’s best dishes. But first, let me hash out a few quick thoughts on some of the trends we’ve been seeing.
If I had to predict the future of splurge-y dining back in 2009 — not too long after I began reviewing restaurants — I would’ve guessed that we’d soon wean ourselves off obvious indulgences like caviar, wagyu, and truffles. And that we’d be eating smaller portions of meat or fish in lean, intimate restaurants. Not the worst guess. But it’s not really the complete answer, at least not for 2024.
A predictable strain of luxury is coursing its way through New York’s dining scene at the moment.
Miyazaki and other hyper-marbled steaks have gone from occasional indulgences to expected upsells, targeted at social media algorithms and well-heeled diners who want top shell labels they recognize. While shucking oysters at a Brooklyn birthday party this summer (lol), I chatted with an accomplished pianist who actually took a job with, I kid you not, the wagyu lobby. Perhaps that explains why I can find the stuff on a French dip sandwich at the Taylor Swift restaurant for $36.
Maybe I’ll ask my friend if I can get a job with the caviar lobby, but it seems as if those fishy folks already have their bases covered. Expensive roe, indeed, became a new black gold for restaurateurs looking to pump up guest checks. It arrived on savory pastries. And on chicken nuggets. I even had some osetra on ice cream as part of a Modern Mexican tasting menu. It was incredible! But you know what was even more incredible? The fact that there was no caviar at all when I went back.
Things got posh this year. A proper new crop of escapist dining stadiums channeled the Gilded Aughts.
A Korean fried chicken spot did its best impression of a sleek nightclub; the first thing you saw (after the doorman checked you out) wasn’t a host but a whole lot of Hermès hand soap. A sprawling Daniel Boulud steakhouse opened underneath a finance firm with $1.5 trillion in assets under management (go ahead, complain about the $24 martinis). And just as Barry Jenkins went from “Moonlight” to “Mufasa” (good for him!), a certain creative Italian restaurant underwent massive renovations, transforming itself into a baller steakhouse backed by Tao. Yep, that’s Crane Club, and the guy next to me wore a watch that costs more than the house my parents live in.
And in a Park Avenue office building where Daniel Humm really wanted to serve plant-based fare to hedge funders, Jean-Georges Vongerichten ended up opening a 14,000-square-foot palace with wagyu tartare, wagyu tenderloins, and wagyu strips. The most hilarious “Men Are From Mars” quote from the whole affair? “But we didn’t want a vegan restaurant at 425 Park Avenue. We want a place where our customers will come back several times a month,” a real estate executive told the New York Post in 2022.
I suppose it’s more red meat elitism than steak-and-potatoes populism, but whatever the case, this is where we’re at. Just don’t bring back the Kobe meatballs of the 2010s!
Shellfish, like steak, is one of the pillars of New York dining, so it’s not surprising we saw more of this in 2024.
But our new class of crustaceans felt particularly smart and forward-looking. Eel Bar gave us briny fried mussels. Penny made waves with medium-rare shrimp cocktail and shellfish platters for one. And Rice Thief might’ve been the sleeper hit of the year, offering up soy crabs with so much orange roe it’s as if someone cracked a farm fresh eggs into each carapace.
Coinciding with our seafood-y zeitgeist is that more new restaurants took inspiration from Basque Country. And while we don’t have our own Asador Etxebarri here, cooking over wood or binchotan coals went from an outlier to an expectation, imparting a little (or a lot of smoke) to vegetables, meats, and my hair. Theodora falls into that category, and it repped the dry-aged fish trend as well (see also: Il Totano, Heroes).
I really liked Theodora. It felt like a singular expression of creativity, a melding of Mexican and Mediterranean influences. And Bridges knocked it out of the park too, with its blend of French, Basque, and Cantonese sensibilities. And while a certain udon shop went predictably viral, I’m glad that one of our toughest reservations was Rasheeda Purdie’s breakfast spot. At Ramen by Ra, she sells noodle soups with “bacon, soy egg, and cheese.” There’s some lard shoyu in there too. I hear it’s quite good — props to Helen Rosner for the review — and I’ll have more to say once I make a prepaid reservation a month out.
What a city. Sometimes, dining out felt intimate and amazing and breathtakingly global this year. But sometimes, our dining rooms and steaks felt as big and cumbersome as our skyscrapers. We’ll figure it out.
Behind the Paywall: New York’s 21 Best Dishes of 2024
The city’s best new burger
The top new lobster dishes: au poivre and ceviche
New York’s finest new sandwich
A cool new place for really good quesadillas
This list is presented in no particular order.