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Ice cream shop · Gramercy
"Caffè Panna was opened in 2019 by Hallie Meyer as an homage to Italian coffee and gelato. The original location is on Irving Place in Gramercy Park. It offers an array of gelatos, including classic flavors, coffee drinks, and daily new flavors using Greenmarket ingredients. After a pandemic blip, it added hand-packed pints to its offerings. A new outpost in Greenpoint includes an ice-cream factory and seating area. The ice cream is rich and chewy with specific flavors like stracciatella and cookies and cream. The venue offers affogatos and granitas, and the cream is imported from Piedmont and whipped fresh daily. High demand leads to rapid flavor sellouts." - Shauna Lyon
Fine dining restaurant · Chinatown
"In a moody, rustic space on the bottom edge of the Lower East Side, I encountered Fidel Caballero’s ambitious restaurant built on northern Mexican ingredients—green chiles, flour tortillas, plenty of cheese—while drawing freely from French, Chinese, and, especially, Japanese techniques. The name references korima, a Tarahumara principle of communality, and Caballero’s background (raised between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, with stints at Rhodora and Contra) informs the food’s hybrid sensibility. The tortillas are attention-grabbing: made with butter and a bit of sourdough starter, cooked one at a time over the back of an inverted wok and finished with a torch, served with softened cultured butter colored by recado negro, and sold for nine dollars apiece. What first hooked me was an enormous, jewel-like seasonal sashimi platter (now often eighty-sixed), and when it wasn’t available I loved the hiramasa crudo—thick yellow-jack slices layered with crunchy celtuce and dressed with olive oil, soy, a husk-cherry salsa, and a herb-sesame-chicharrón dust like a Mexican furikake. The kitchen excels at coaxing deep, slow-cooked textures: ayacote beans in a whey-based, chili-spiced broth topped with house headcheese; duck enmoladas of long-braised dark meat in a black-garlic mole wrapped in an amaranth tortilla and topped with an airy “cotija foam.” The menu also flirts with obscure regional ingredients (chintixtle, chicatanas) and playful contrasts—a blue-corn quesadilla with asadero, huitlacoche, and shaved truffle; a bright shrimp aguachile marinated in rhubarb and hibiscus with shiso and Japanese cherry-blossom notes. Cocktails by Sam Geller skew bright and crisp (a cilantro-blended Tequila Verde Highball and the surprisingly effective Uni Gin Sour). You can book à-la-carte up front or a two-hour tasting menu in the back for $98; I found the tasting occasionally brilliant (a nixtamalized daikon with fava stems and green aguachile foam) but overall haphazard and uneven, with lukewarm or bewildering courses and service issues that left even the miraculous tortillas arriving cold—so for now I recommend sticking to the à-la-carte side of the room." - Helen Rosner

Business to business service · Tysons Corner
"I remember it as a thimble-size, Michelin-starred downtown tasting-menu restaurant that closed late last year after a decade of service." - Helen Rosner
Udon noodle restaurant · East Village
"Even if you have trouble spotting Okiboru House of Udon’s nondescript shopfront, you won’t miss the line that winds halfway down the East Village block; the shop doesn’t take reservations or permit takeout, and its cozy quarters (eighteen slender counter seats) plus hype from foodie TikTokers and microinfluencers mean long waits (an aspiring diner said he had been waiting forty-five minutes). If you’re lucky enough to be ushered in you may be tempted to film immediately—the Altoid-like tablet that blooms into a warm hand towel and the three-second menu (three items and one vegan alternative) are irresistibly photogenic. The signature dish is the cold Himokawa udon: served in a ceramic ring bowl that echoes an oversized ring light, the noodles are beguilingly wide Möbius-strip–like ribbons of silk—sleek, slippery, and best handled with the supplied tongs for a bite before dunking in the dipping sauce, which clings pleasingly though is a touch too salty for my taste; it’s also offered in a hot soup. My favorite, and the least featured in the videos I’d seen, was the matcha-flavored dipping udon—a comely mass of wriggly jade-colored “worms” nestled on crushed ice—whose texture unfurls slowly and whose flavor moves from slight sweetness to a surprising savory seaweed note and finishes on a complicated, satisfying nuttiness; noodle sets with tempura are $24. Co-owner Justin Lim (53) told me that udon and tsukemen are all about the noodles, and he and partner Naoki Kyobashi previously opened a hugely popular, similarly minimalist tsukemen shop in 2022 after years of learning to make them." - J, i, a, y, a, n, g, , F, a, n
Vegan restaurant · Williamsburg
"Tucked into 234 Union Ave., Brooklyn, HAAM (an acronym for 'healthy as a motha') is a white-walled, sunlit, entirely plant-based Caribbean restaurant whose cooking felt like pure sensory happiness. The Buss Up Shut Roti Plate is a kaleidoscopic riot of flavors: a pliant, chewy paratha roti piled beside a vivid-orange swipe of earthy-sweet mashed pumpkin, tender stewed greens, and a sharp, deep, spicy curry mango that made every neuron fire; the turmeric-yellow 'curry chicken' is actually 'chik'n,' a soy-and-wheat substitute that convincingly mimics bird, and what looks like crispy fried chicken atop the mofongo is a teetering stack of oyster mushrooms. When I dropped in, a server suggested the Chimichurri Chunk Steak ($29), made with Chunk Foods faux beef that arrived seared and tender-pink—eerily like an actual filet—and was marvelous alongside fried plantains, rice, soupy black beans, and Ramdass’s ultra-garlicky chimichurri. Chef-owner Yesenia Ramdass, a mom of three from Washington Heights who veganized Dominican and Trinidadian family favorites after discovering Skinny Bitch, started HAAM as a pop-up and Smorgasburg stall; the menu still includes social-media-friendly snacks (like barbecue-sauced faux meat with tamarind chutney on a fried-plantain split) while the dine-in offerings allow for more refined plates: a mofongo studded with smoky tempeh in a pale coconut-cream curry sauce, precisely plated yucca fries beside a jerk-mushroom patacón, and a lime-bright ceviche of hearts of palm on tostones topped with a tiny HAAM paper flag and bested by a few dashes of the house Hot as a Motha sauce (made from peppers grown by Ramdass’s father-in-law). The space—basket-cane lights and murals of tropical greenery—feels like sunshine even on rainy days, and drinks like fresh-pressed sugarcane juice and Tyrian-purple sorrel punch (hibiscus steeped with clove and cinnamon) reinforce the West Indian vibe. The restaurant keeps slightly odd hours, opening at 1 P.M. on weekdays and closing most nights by nine, and while I remain skeptical of 'healthy' as a moral goal, dining here feels indulgent and joyful—and, I suppose, healthy by some definitions." - H, e, l, e, n, , R, o, s, n, e, r
Permanently Closed
"Another of a recent spate of Mexican seafood-and-cocktail spots, serves crudos and aguachiles along with snacks such as a lovely crisp-fried-cod tostada, in a sexy underground-clublike atmosphere." - Shauna Lyon
Mexican restaurant · Long Island City
"Known as the city’s first Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant, Casa Enrique has been serving exceptional traditional Mexican food in Long Island City since 2012, and it’s where Cosme and Luis Aguilar made their name." - S, h, a, u, n, a, , L, y, o, n
Mexican restaurant · Santee
"Located in the East Village, Bad Hombre is one of a recent wave of Mexican seafood-and-cocktail spots; I found its crudos and aguachiles and snacks—such as a lovely crisp-fried-cod tostada—served in a sexy, underground-clublike atmosphere." - S, h, a, u, n, a, , L, y, o, n
Fine dining restaurant · Midtown West
"At the Fifth Avenue Hotel's swanky dining room I was charmed by the irresistible, pencil-thin, two-foot grissini—breadsticks presented in a vase and replenished so deftly we nearly cheered—which set the tone for a meal that is simultaneously serious and mischievous. The exquisitely appointed room (blue and gold, rich woods, soaring ceilings, faux trees, balcony box seating) and bow-tied service are matched by an elegant, precise menu; Andrew Carmellini, a former Boulud protege who runs Locanda Verde, Lafayette and the Dutch among others, is personally in the kitchen much of the time, and the place feels like a stylish, slightly theatrical legacy play that nonetheless knows how to have fun. The cooking is neither strictly French nor Italian—there are French quantities of butter and an almost Italian ecstasy about vegetables—but it delights in boldness rather than subtlety: Scallops Cardoz arrives with a layered masala and cardamom-and-makrut-lime basmati; a revived, creamy Billi bi mussel-soup idea becomes a sauce for poached halibut with a saffron note; and the Chicken Gran Sasso (listed at $45 per person, effectively a $90 bird) is served in two courses—light meat first, then the dark—yielding both ermine-white breast slices with peppers and rapini and a second plate of crisp-skinned thighs and a leg atop roasted potatoes with an intense brown gravy. There are occasional nouvelle-cuisine fussy touches—a sardine toast plated with extraneous garnishes, a precarious crab mille-feuille—but foam is often put to good use (most memorably in the Duck‑Duck‑Duck Tortellini, which deploys duck three ways: farce, demi‑glace, and a foie‑gras foam). Even the salads are boldly dressed (a chicory salad sharpened with plenty of cheese), and the dessert program—built on the work of pastry veterans and led here by Jeffrey Wurtz—is intelligently bright: a toasty coconut sorbet, a passionfruit semifreddo companion, pistachio gelato with cherry syrup, and the theatrical, brilliant A.B.C. grapefruit sorbetto finished tableside with Dolin dry vermouth, all of which leave the meal feeling rich, dramatic, and very, very fun." - Helen Rosner
Restaurant · Williamsburg
"At Robbins’s newest spot, Misipasta, which opened last summer on the ground floor of a charming brick row house at 46 Grand St., I find a market as much as a restaurant: a narrow room given over to operational space with an airy pasta-making area up front, an efficient galley kitchen in back, shelves of groceries, a refrigerator case of sauces and cheeses, and a glass counter of fresh pastas by the pound. There’s a brief, focused eat-in menu that delivers exactly what a tired and hungry person wants—about twenty counter seats, dim soothing lights, cocktails and bitter Italian sodas, and an air that smells of Parmigiano and butter while the Pointer Sisters play. I love the enormous green salad of bitter mustard greens, frilly arugula, dates, and almonds in a sharp vinaigrette; the kingly mozzarella in carrozza; and the nutty, funky prosciutto served with enormous, fluffy gougères (try both in one bite). Though the to-go case shows a dozen shapes, the dine-in menu offers just two pastas and they’re enough: a subtle, nourishing spaghetti cooked just to the stern side of al dente, tossed with garlicky butter, starchy cooking water, shaved bottarga and crisp breadcrumbs; and luscious cappelletti—parmesan, ricotta, mascarpone and prosciutto—dressed simply in butter and sage and served in a small terra-cotta bowl that forces you to slow down and savor each bite. There’s often a third, to-go-only pastina in an intense, collagen-rich brodo that leaves your lips sticky. I also appreciate the all-day accessibility—the shop is open nearly all day, diners seated through around 10 P.M., so you can often breeze in at 11 A.M. or 3 P.M.—though I worry the secret will get out and the friendly, neighborhoody feel will tighten up; when warmer weather returns the beautiful backyard will reopen and nearly double capacity. Buy an espresso, a slice of crispy rosemary farinata, one of the city’s great secret artichoke sandwiches, a pint of satiny hazelnut gelato, a pound of lumache or paccheri, or a jar of the heady thirty-clove sauce—just know you won’t make Robbins’s pasta quite the same at home, but it’s worth trying." - Helen Rosner