Even if all we’d tasted at Baba’s Pantry, a Palestinian American café in Kansas City, Missouri, had been the hummus, we still may have named it one of this year’s best new restaurants. Velvet-smooth and crowned with a luscious mound of aromatic shaved beef or lamb, it is perhaps the best we’ve ever had. The restaurant’s owner, Yahia Kamal—Baba to his children and just about anyone who knows him—has run a number of different food businesses since he immigrated to America in 1979. This, however, is the first restaurant he’s ever called his own, and the first time he’s declared his business to be proudly Palestinian. In every way, Baba’s Pantry is a family affair. Yahia’s oldest son Kamal Kamal is an interior designer, and he transformed the humble storefront into a deeply personal space that honors both his family’s Palestinian homeland and their life in the diaspora. Yusra Abu-Alhassab, Yahia’s wife, may bring out a crystal thimble of coffee and a sticky slice of baklava to cap off your meal. Even the design here points to family: antique radios line the window, an homage to Yahia’s father, who collected them for years. But even if you notice none of these perfectly heartwarming elements, trust us when we say: The hummus is enough. —Amiel Stanek Read more about the Kamal family’s journey to opening Baba’s Pantry

When chef James Martin left fine dining kitchens to start his own restaurant, he wasn’t interested in cooking just one single cuisine. That wouldn’t have represented what Martin finds so fascinating: the many intersections and influences that shape how we eat. At the laid-back and thoughtfully designed Bocadillo Market, he highlights similarities between Spanish dishes—particularly those brought over by the Moors of North Africa—and the Low Country–influenced ones he grew up eating as the DC-born child of Southern parents. The result is magnificent. Croquetas on the dinner menu are packed with smoky ham hock, and the Sunday brunch menu features such revelations as a waffle loaded with duck confit. Whether you show up for weekday breakfast (a towering slice of egg-yolk-rich Extremadura pie, plus a sandwich piled with Serrano ham and Mahón cheese) or dinner (saffron-tinted lima bean stew is a must-order), you’ll leave very full and grateful Martin thought to bring all these flavors together. —Elazar Sontag

Removed from the bustle of the main commercial strip in Hudson, New York, Cafe Mutton inhabits a cottage-like corner building that gives the entire restaurant a quaint feel. But there’s nothing mild-mannered or understated about the food Shaina Loew-Banayan and their small kitchen crew—plus Shaina’s wife, Bettina Loew-Banayan, who runs the dining room—put out for breakfast and lunch four days a week and for dinner on Fridays. This is decadent, unpretentious cooking, influenced by Shaina’s meat-loving Hungarian ancestors, and informed by what their farmer and forager friends bring them each week. While so many new restaurants in this hyper-online era are shaped by the tastes of TikTok-obsessed diners and Instagram influencers, Cafe Mutton is staunchly disinterested in trendiness. A line on the restaurant’s own Instagram account proclaims “We don’t have fucking breakfast sandwiches.” But don’t worry, there is made-from-scratch fried bologna piled on bread, along with homemade sausages and poached eggs done up with the most velvety hollandaise. A deviled pork trotter on the dinner menu, lightly breaded and served with sauerkraut, makes a very strong case for more restaurants cooking pig feet. All the while, you won’t miss breakfast sandwiches for a moment. —Elazar Sontag Read more about chef-owner Shaina Loew-Banayan

Tavel Bristol-Joseph, a Guyana-born pastry chef, has been at the helm of some of Austin’s most beloved restaurants with his business partner, chef Kevin Fink. But Canje is different from those other restaurants, and not just because Bristol-Joseph has gone savory. It’s also the first time in his career that he’s cooking the kind of food he grew up with, and he’s committed to representing not just Guyana, but the entire Caribbean, with all its layers of influence: African, Latino, Chinese, Portuguese, Indian, and beyond. There are crisp hunks of bacalaíto—fritters of salted fish left over from making ceviche—kissed with zingy mint mojo sauce. And you should absolutely sop up a deeply flavorful beef curry with golden brown lily pads of Guyanese roti. There’s pepperpot, too, a rich meat stew made with molasses-like cassareep, a singular ingredient native to Guyana. And then there’s the dish I still dream about: a pillow of crispy-skinned wild bass resting in a pool of plush, creamy rum butter sauce. Even before the coconut-milk-soaked tres leches cake hits the table, you’ll understand exactly what makes Canje one of the best new restaurants in the country. —Hilary Cadigan

It’s easy to look right past another trendy wine bar selling cloudy pours of natural wine and a few bites of food on the side. But skipping Daytrip, in Oakland, would be a big mistake. This bright restaurant with a disco ball glimmering in the middle of the dining room is more like a jubilant dinner party than a wine bar (though all the wines are excellent and fun to drink). The names of every restaurant worker are printed in the corner of the menu, and those servers and cooks swing by often to tell you how the kitchen team landed on the winning combination of charred favas with candied sesame brittle and white jasmine ricotta, or hand-cut pasta with honeynut squash miso and pearls of kelp. As restaurants across the country struggled to staff up during the pandemic, Daytrip made headlines for having a surplus of applicants. Workers were eager to join co-owners Stella Dennig and Finn Stern, who made pay transparency a core tenet and the happiness of their staff central to their business approach. That sense of joy makes the experience all the more lovely. In a city overrun with buzzy restaurants, it seems like everyone wants to eat—and work—at this one. —Elazar Sontag

The best pasta in the country right now is at the very top of Philly’s BOK building—at eight stories, the striking 1930s Art Deco vocational school turned creative hub towers over the sleepy blocks of row houses that surround it. Go down an echoey hallway, past the former girl’s gymnasium and up the elevator to the top floor. There, in an old nursing classroom warmed up with vintage lamps and multihued midcentury furniture, you’ll find Irwin’s, chef Michael Vincent Ferreri’s ode to the food of Sicily. A plate of chewy hand-rolled twists of trofie pasta; a cold glass of fizzy biodynamic wine; a seat on the rooftop terrace watching the sun set over Center City. Heaven. Every single plate that hits the table, be it a crackling pile of fritto misto, a sticky agrodolce chicken, or a crisp swordfish milanese, dances on the razor’s edge between rusticity and precision that makes good Southern Italian cooking so thrilling. It’s easy to imagine that Ferreri and his team feel, deservedly, like they’re on top of the world. And for a few glorious hours, so can you. —Amiel Stanek

At República, a buzzy restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District, every ingredient is treated like a precious living artifact. Crispy chicatana ants are blitzed into creamy moles and aiolis. The distilled spirit raicilla, made from roasted agave fermented in a traditional Jaliscan rock pit, is moussified with pineapple into an elegant dessert. Behind these dishes is not just one chef but a whole team, each with their own area of expertise. Co-owner Angel Medina is the originator of the restaurant’s expansive “Mexico-forward” vision; co-owner and executive chef Lauro Romero runs the kitchen with chef de cuisine Juan Gomez; and co-owner and executive pastry chef Olivia Bartruff is the force behind the fanciful desserts. Their shared approach is one of playful yet reverent celebration, highlighted by the history lessons and anecdotes that come along with each dish in the six-course tasting menu. Pairings of mostly Mexican wines or agave-based spirits complete the experience. Sitting outside on the covered patio, you might just wonder if you’re eating the most thoughtfully prepared food in the country. Lucky for all of us, it’s also some of the tastiest. —Hilary Cadigan

Under the direction of chef Vijay Kumar, regional Southern Indian dishes reign at New York’s Semma: spicy-sweet Goanese oxtails, Mangalore cauliflower presented in a delicate crescent that belies a major punch of spice, Keralan banana-leaf-wrapped fish. Plus a Platonic-ideal dosa, corners tucked tightly into a triangle with a mess of masala potatoes inside, and side dishes like a parotta as flaky-soft as they come and the ponni rice Kumar grew up eating on his family’s paddy fields in Tamil Nadu. In the paddies as a child, he’d hunt for snails—which he’s reimagined into one of the restaurant’s standout dishes, served on a bed of their shells. Pair your food with one of the bar’s killer drinks, like the Whistle Podu, a particular favorite that features curry-leaf-infused gin, ginger liqueur, and cardamom. Indian restaurants may be a dime a dozen in New York—and nationwide—but the wide breadth of Southern Indian cuisine hasn’t always received the attention it deserves. Thanks to chef Kumar, who approaches the vast range of dishes, flavors, and ingredients across the region with care and precision, that’s changing. —Sonia Chopra

Supperland’s co-owners Jamie Brown and Jeff Tonidandel describe their restaurant as a “Southern steakhouse meets church potluck.” Housed in a restored and grandly redecorated midcentury church, this perfectly over-the-top restaurant is a welcome rebuttal to the tired trend of “small plates meant for sharing.” Everything is indeed meant for sharing here, but nothing is small. Take, for example, a magnificent dish called Pork Can Can—a custom-deluxe slab of bone-in Cheshire pork that contains loin, rib, and belly meat, a comma-shaped cut the size of an adult fist and forearm combined. It’s grilled on the wood-fired hearth at the front of the restaurant, and each slice is all rosy pink flesh with gorgeously rendered fat. A kitschy seven-layer salad served in a goblet the size of a small trophy is meant for sharing, too, as is a literal Dutch oven’s worth of Wagyu pot roast. Throughout the restaurant, wood pews are packed with diners digging into big-spirited food designed to be enjoyed in a big-spirited space alongside as many loved ones as you can gather—what higher calling could a restaurant have? —Amiel Stanek

When Katianna and John Hong decided to open Yangban Society, their downtown LA Korean American restaurant-slash-superette, the chef-couple knew that they wanted a place that allowed them, first and foremost, to explore. It would be a place where they could express their shared Korean American identities for one, but also the Jewish American heritage of Katianna’s adoptive father. The result is a fun, fascinating restaurant with extraordinary range. Want a plate of crispy, sticky-sweet chicken wings and a plastic 1.6-liter bottle of cheap Korean beer? You got it. A baller dry-aged New York strip steak and a cold bottle of Krug? You can have that too. Whatever your order, the Hongs approach all of their food—the high and the low, the kitschy and the creative—with the kind of seriousness you’d expect from their Michelin-starred résumés. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure extravaganza—a place that, like its owners and diners, contains multitudes. Yangban Society isn’t one thing; it’s everything all at once, and it’s all the more delicious for it. —Amiel Stanek