This is the kind of place where there’s no dance floor but people dance, where it’s unhip but often crowded. It’s all to the backdrop of worn yellow walls bedecked with palm trees, bananas, farmers, and musicians. You’ll also find some of the city’s best Cuban sandwiches, vaca frita (skirt steak fried to the texture of soft jerky), and potent mojitos. Swing by after a show for live Cuban music every night.

When Haidilao opened its first New York location in 2019, Eater called it an “adult playground.” The Chinese hot pot chain, which has over 1,300 locations globally, is a fine-tuned fun machine: There are hand-pulled “dancing” noodles prepared out at the table, free toothbrushes in the bathroom, and “code words” that elicit secret menu items. The restaurant is spread out over two huge dining rooms on the second floor of a shopping mall in Flushing, Queens.

The Scotto family — host and matriarch Marion, her daughters Elaina Scotto and Fox 5 anchor and co-host of Good Day New York, Rosanna Scotto — have been feeding dishes like chicken Scarpariello and Dover sole to Midtown’s power set since 1993. But it was during the pandemic that the sisters took a cue from Miami, they said, and pivoted to make the experience more about fun. Now, expect DJs and conga lines — and when Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker” cues up, you know Mayor Eric Adams is in the house.

For years, Let’s Meat was Koreatown’s only all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant. Others have come along, but this rowdy restaurant remains one of the most affordable options in the area. The menu has two price tiers: The $43 menu gets you unlimited soups, banchan, and a dozen types of meat for 100 minutes, while the $49 set comes with a few more items, like strip steak and marinated squid. Beer, soju, and somaek towers keep the good vibes going.

Sushi on Me is a raucous, all-you-can-drink, cash-only party. It’s located inside of a Jackson Heights basement (there’s a second location in Williamsburg; however, nothing is quite as fun as the original). Sushi on Me set the tone for a new era of omakase experiences in New York: the kind that can actually be unbuttoned fun, where the music is loud, and the cussing flows as freely as the alcohol.

It helps when a fun restaurant has great food, too. That’s the case at Sappe, the new restaurant from one of the city’s top Thai spots, Soothr. The vibe feels a little bit like a club — neon lights, mirrors on the ceiling, colorful cocktails — but the food is top-notch. The charcoal-grilled skewers and pan-fried noodles are great for sharing, and the menu has a few hard-to-find dishes for those who like trying something new, like sok lek kua, made by cooking beef, liver, and tripe with blood and seafood sauce.

The zany sibling to Don Angie, San Sabino, right next door, has fun with Italian American dishes, like a trio of extra-large shrimp blanketed with cheese for a shrimp Parmesan; a comely plate of stuffed mussels with ‘nduja; or a pepperoni carbonara with Sichuan peppercorns. The drinks are festive, too, especially the Benny, a spicy house margarita that’s a nod to the former tenant of the place, Benny’s Burritos.

In Taiwan, 886 is the area code given to most cell phone numbers: In the East Village, it’s a sign of a good time. This Taiwanese restaurant has improved some since its opening in 2018. Blood cakes and other Taiwanese snacks are consumed at tables in a narrow dining room whose ceiling is covered in neon lights. On the menu: a “Bad Idea” drinking challenge that must be consumed through a straw and a Taiwanese hot dog named “the sausage party.”

New York classic haunts are undeniably fun, especially those that are allegedly haunted. One of the oldest taverns in New York, Ear Inn is reliable for a casual night out over martinis, burgers, and drawing on a paper tablecloth with crayons. And it still has the feeling of being a hardscrabble dive patronized by sailors from the piers just at the end of the street (or their ghosts).

C as in Charlie is on a mission to get you drunk. Dinner at this Korean American restaurant starts with a free shot of sake/soju, and the drinks list has lots of Korean spirits to keep the party going. The food menu — fried chicken, a “Seoul’sbury steak” — is short and affordable. Did we mention it has one of the strangest bathrooms in the city?

The most fun restaurants in NYC do not have to be alcohol-fueled. In fact, here the experience of dining is not only meditative but restorative. To partake you’ll need to disrobe down to your swimsuit, as this spot — that serves vareniki and borscht — is located inside Spa 88, a basement-level Russian spa known for food almost as much as its banya.

Velma is an Italian restaurant that passes as a dive bar. Or is it the other way around? There are gingham tablecloths, big booths, and chicken Parmesan: Fair enough. But what about the beer and shot specials, chicken nuggets, and Smirnoff Ices on the menu? This isn’t the best Italian food in town, but at Velma, there’s at least one benefit to not having a nonna around: Almost anything goes.

The restaurant is a lot of things: A place where you can sit in movie theater seats hunched over a suitcase acting as a table, eating laab gai sap on a paper plate while various Thai movies play on screen. It’s not a movie theater, per se, in that tables don’t all face toward the screen, and the sound was off on a recent visit, but the Thai cinema theme makes the atmosphere unlike any other spot in the city — a place for a snack with a beer, rather than a full-blown dinner. 

Roll N Roaster was founded in the early 1970s and it feels largely unchanged — a gigantic structure in yellow and orange that looks like a typical fast-food spot, except much bigger and wholly its own. Go on the weekend when the place is jammed with Little Leaguers in full regalia, or families returning from religious observances in their best clothes, and mingle with a cross-section of southern Brooklynites.

New York City isn’t exactly known for its beaches, but the boardwalk experience at Tatiana, a restaurant in Brighton Beach, is a fever dream — and one of the last of its kind. The banquet hall is outfitted with tablecloths and ornate furniture, the kind of gaudy gold-painted accents that befit an old-school Eastern European venue, where it’s likely you’ll be crashing someone’s wedding or sweet sixteen. All tables face the stage where dinner — cherry vareniki and lots of icy vodka — comes with a show. Think aerial acrobatics and sing-alongs to ABBA. The dance floor opens later in the night to diners.