Best New York City Dishes
Sometimes it’s just a crackle: a shatter so crisp, you can feel it in the back of your head. Sometimes it’s a brash commitment to butter, or an unexpected tenderness. What makes a dish memorable can be as faint as a trace of smoke or as forceful as a fistful of chiles, or as profound as knowing how much time, labor and quiet virtuosity are manifest on the plate. When you eat for a living, as I am so lucky to do, your palate occasionally gets overwhelmed and everything starts to taste the same. It feels like a gift, then, to encounter a dish that wakes you up from your stupor and teaches you to love food again.
Bánh Cuốn at Bánh Anh Em
Thin as a kerchief, the sheet of dough is somewhere between noodle and crepe and almost gooey, made with fermented rice flour for extra suppleness. You’d think it would tear at the slightest touch, yet here it is, beautifully whole and deftly folded around a mince of wood-ear mushrooms and ground pork. Every adornment has a purpose: crisped shallots for crunch, reviving cilantro and nước chấm to cut the earthiness. You can watch a dedicated bánh cuốn specialist, Tuyết Phạm, make sheet after sheet in the open kitchen, and know you’re in the presence of a master. ($14.95)
99 Third Avenue (East 13th Street), East Village; 833-674-5878; banhanhem.com
Guinea Hen Ragù at Borgo
A guinea hen is only a distant cousin to the chicken. Its ancestors roamed African savannas, not the jungles of Asia. Although long domesticated, it retains a streak of wildness and can be a tricky bird to raise. At Borgo, braised slowly and with infinite patience in this rustic, expansively warming ragù, it relinquishes its readiness to fight and turns tender. It’s all dark meat, which means nothing but flavor. ($34)
124 East 27th Street (Lexington Avenue), Midtown; 646-360-2404; borgonyc.com
Taco Richi at Cuerno
Cuerno may be a steakhouse, but the star of the menu isn’t the dinosaur-scaled porterhouse. It’s a taco, served open-faced, like a book that’s split along its spine to reveal its most loved page. What a heap awaits: wide ribbons of rib-eye, ruffly from the heat; pork cracklings simmered in salsa verde, leaching their fat; and a soft, homey flour tortilla under a crust of seared cheese, for a jolt of salt and glory. Fold it up and the juices drip down your fingers. If the server warns you not to order more than one, defy him. ($12)
1271 Avenue of the Americas (50th Street), Midtown; 332-269-0094; cuernony.com
Chicken Bastilla at Dar Lbahja
A traditional, communal-size chicken bastilla might be built of as many as a hundred layers of warqa, pastry sheets stretched thin by repeatedly slapping the dough by hand against a hot griddle. At this modest Moroccan spot, the pie is daintier in size but still technically complex, with stewed shredded chicken and almonds crushed with cinnamon and sugar, wrapped inside those delicate, baked-until-crackly sheets. The chef Touria Lamtahaf crowns it with more almonds, slivered, and a scatter of confectioner’s sugar and rose petals. You taste sweetness, then salt, and the two become one. ($12)
47-12 30th Avenue (48th Street), Astoria, Queens; 347-242-3702; instagram.com/dar_lbahja_nyc
Goat at Kabawa
Why does steak get all the worship in this town? At Kabawa, the chef Paul Carmichael keeps vigil over goat shoulder as it cooks for hours, then pulls it off the bones, presses it with a weight and cooks it some more. On the plate, it’s tender — a shrug away from dissolution — but still deeply animal. It meets its match in the surrounding sauce, an elaboration of pulped tamarind, caramelized ginger, dried scallops revived with a splash of rum and confit habaneros, dizzyingly hot and floral at once. (Part of a $145 prix-fixe menu)
8 Extra Place (East First Street), East Village; 646-790-8747; kabawa.com
Sesame Shao Bing at Lei
This is no ordinary bread. It belongs in the pantheon alongside the croissant, paratha and m’smen. It’s close to flat but contains multitudes, layers of laminated dough so rich they almost preen. The top is crusted edge to edge with enough sesame seeds to constitute a texture in themselves. But maybe the best part is the cold butter, a wedge of it sticking out like a tongue and melting as you go, so you get lushness along with the shatter of a hundred flaky shards. ($9)
15-17 Doyers Street (Pell Street), Chinatown; no phone; leiwine.nyc
Diri ak Sòs Pwa at Maison Passerelle
The pyrotechnics of this dish all happen backstage. At Maison Passerelle, it comes to you as simply what it is, rice and beans, surely the most basic kind of nourishment. And yet each spoonful yields more depth. Everything tastes like the best version of itself: the fluffiest rice and the densest, creamiest kidney beans, simmered with alliums, thyme and musky, warming cloves. In the cooking, half the beans are pulverized and half remain whole, so you get plushness but still a little bite. Diri ak sòs pwa is one of the first dishes that the chef Gregory Gourdet learned to make from his mother, Yanick Gourdet, an immigrant from Haiti, and it seems she taught him right. (Part of a $135 prix-fixe menu)
1 Wall Street (Broadway), Financial District; 212-217-2288; maisonpasserellenyc.com
BBQ Mackerel at Smithereens
Mackerel was once slandered as a scavenger that fed on sailors lost at sea. Even today it’s disdained as a pungent, oily fish, when in fact it’s far gentler in flavor than crowd-pleasers like salmon. The chef Nicholas Tamburo does it justice here, presenting it whole — minus the head, but spine intact and tail flared like a flag — and barbecued in a style that draws from Caribbean jerk, with the warmth of allspice and nutmeg, a pucker from tamarind paste, pickled Thai chiles bringing a muted fire and molasses for a mellow sweetness. ($62)
414 East Ninth Street (First Avenue), East Village; no phone; smithereensnyc.com
Banchan at Sunn’s
Before opening Sunn’s, the chef Sunny Lee made a name for herself with the pop-up Banchan by Sunny, specializing in the small dishes that are an essential part of a Korean meal. They are still the primary draw at her tiny restaurant, where the lineup changes nightly and according to the season. Sometimes the inspiration comes from her Korean heritage, as with an earthy acorn jelly that eludes the chopsticks, but she also roams widely and isn’t afraid to mix and match, uplifting leeks vinaigrette with hot Chinese mustard and transforming the American picnic staple of potato salad by swapping out the apple for juicy chunks of Korean pear. ($25 for 6)
139 Division Street, (Canal Street), Chinatown; 917-540-0884 (texting only); sunnsnyc.com
Poached Chicken Rice at Uncle Ray’s Chicken Rice
At this unassuming storefront, Raymond Kiang honors the legacy of his father, Sergeant Kiang, one of the chefs behind the legendary boneless chicken rice recipe introduced at in Singapore in the early 1970s. The chicken, slippery and silky, is poached in stock, then dunked in ice water to shock the fat into forming a magical jelly under the skin. Still, it’s the rice that steals the show, fragrant and plumped by hot chicken broth. A Singaporean friend once texted me excitedly that the younger Mr. Kiang’s chicken rice “borders on excellent,” which for a Singaporean in America is the highest praise. ($18)
790 Ninth Avenue (West 53rd Street), Hell’s Kitchen; 646-992-4343; unclerayschickenrice.com
Chocolate Cake at the View
Angel food cake is as it sounds, all sweetness and light and reaching for the heavens. Devil’s food cake is dark and deep, binding you to the pleasures of the earth. The pastry chef Emily Fu understands human nature and doesn’t hold back. Her cake looms, three layers sealed by chocolate caramel ganache, veering on fudge, with hot salted caramel poured tableside, like an anointing. In truth, it’s too good for the devil. Eat and give thanks for one of the world’s small wonders. ($19)
1535 Broadway (46th Street), Times Square; 212-704-8900; theviewnewyorkcity.com
Madeleines at Zimmi’s
We do not have to mention Proust. It is enough to hold a madeleine in the hand, hardly any weight at all, baked to order and warm, gilded nearly to brown, with its telltale ridges and little swell. The sponge cake is a simple equation of butter, eggs and sugar rubbed with lemon and orange zest, for that touch of brightness like sun filtering through the curtains. And yet the math doesn’t work. It’s so much more: rich yet light, unfussy yet luxurious, and everything you want. ($16)
72 Bedford Street (Commerce Street), West Village; 646-770-9038; zimmisnyc.com