New York's 25 Best Dishes of 2025
Mommy Pai's, Smithereens, Wild Cherry, Estela, The View, Dolores, Vato, and others make the list!
Last week, I wrote about some of the cool (and tiresome) trends we’re seeing across the restaurant landscape, including the taco boom and red meat mania.
Today, I’m sharing some more personal takes and anecdotes from the year in food.
Please enjoy, and scroll down for my full list of the year’s best dishes.
A few brief notes from my year in eating out!
For the first time in my life, I ate more roasted oysters than raw ones. Strange Delight is partially responsible for this! But so is M.F.K Fisher…
Please put your menus online. Please put your dessert menus online. Please list your pastry chefs on your website. Really.
Eddie Murphy’s “four cheese lasagna” impression of Tracy Morgan was the funniest thing on Saturday Night Live this year. But SNL’s smartest food take, by far, was “Big Dumb Line.”
I now watch movies at Alamo Drafthouse. And honestly, that’s the experience I want more of in 2026: Good bar food, hazy IPAs, La-Z-Boy seating, and a dark room where an attendant is going to kick me out if I keep texting or scrolling.
Red Hook Lobster Pound was still my favorite splurge delivery this year. But I can’t believe we’re living in an era of $50 lobster rolls!
I stopped drinking martinis. I don’t really enjoy them anymore. They’re too boozy for me and they cost too much.
I cooked a lot. A few dinners a week, at least. And almost always for other people. My favorite dish at the moment is vegetarian chile Colorado, amped up with ham hocks and bone broth. I used Melissa Clark’s giant bean guide to steer my recipe, alongside this Max Falkowitz column on dried chiles.
Cookbooks and good online recipes made me happy this year. ChatGPT’s television ads for sh!tty AI recipes made me sad. It drives me nuts that big tech is using its bully pulpit and advertising dollars to promote plagiarized knowledge instead of highlighting individual authors.
My artist friend and I did our annual Caviar Night in August. I picked up some kaluga and blini from Pearl Street. She picked up the Diplomatico rum. I truly believe everyone would be happier if they ate more fish roe at home, where it’s more of an affordable-ish indulgence, rather than a prohibitively expensive one. But I realize that “prohibitively expensive” is the whole point for members of the aristocracy.
This was the year I learned that e-bike fees are capped when you cross a bridge! One of the cheapest and easiest ways to make me happy is by Citibiking over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset.
One of my favorite moments this summer came when an impromptu thunderstorm hit the Rockaways; my friend and I sought cover under an awning and ordered an arepa pabellón and a cold beer from Caracas.
I won’t comment on Andy Cohen’s drunken New Year’s Eve rant about former mayor Eric Adams, but watching B.J. Novak chime in with “See you at Zero Bond” was an absolute delight and a perfectly New York-y way to end the year.
It was nice to hear Zohran Mamdani pay tribute to our city’s diverse foodways in his his inaugural address: “Where else can you hear the sound of the steelpan, savor the smell of sancocho, and pay $9 for coffee on the same block? Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?”
It’s too cold right now, but the second the weather gets warm, I’m going to spend a little more time with The Piragua Guy. Until then, keep scraping by :)
New York’s 25 Best Dishes of 2025
Plus: My favorite affordable tasting menu.
The night after Christmas, I ended up chatting with a young cook sitting next to me at a downtown wine bar. She was telling me about how tough it is to make a living in the industry….and how New York feels so saturated with good restaurants right now.
I couldn’t agree more. On both counts.