George Motz, possibly our greatest scholar of hamburgers, is the owner of this retro fantasia. There are just two burgers on the menu: the Classic Smash and the signature George Motz’s Fried Onion Burger. The Classic Smash is fantastic, strong and correct. You don’t need to know the history of burgers to be taken with its honest flavors, its modest size, its firm handshake of pickle and onion and good ol’ American ground beef.

Oti has existed, in one form or another, for years. Elyas Popa, its Romanian-born proprietor and chef, ran it as a catering business, then as a series of pop-ups and residencies. In September, 2023, Oti became a proper restaurant, serving Popa’s riffs on the food of his childhood, bringing together a collision of Balkan, Ottoman, and Mediterranean influences: soft cheeses, spiced meats, fresh green herbs, a vivid tradition of pickling and curing.

At her new venture, the chef Angie Mar combines a downtown vibe with vivacity and drama. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients such as truffle and foie gras. At times, it can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—but, when it works, it works.

Few people in N.Y.C. understand pasta the way the chef Missy Robbins understands pasta. Misipasta, her latest venture, is a market as much as a restaurant; there are about 20 seats indoors. Despite the dozen or so shapes of pasta available in the to-go case, Misipasta offers only two pastas on the dine-in menu, but two is enough.

At Café Carmellini, where meals are chock-full of delightful flourishes, the breadsticks are one of the most irresistible: a vaseful of grissini, pencil-thin and two feet long. Café Carmellini is a serious, sophisticated, upscale restaurant. The elegant menu matches the room; the precise and attentive service matches the menu. But—as the frankly silly breadsticks foreshadowed—the pomp of the place never lapses into tedium.

If you’re in the mood for beach, you might head to this walk-in-only restaurant, where the chef Cosme Aguilar is serving exquisite Mexican seafood dishes, potent cocktails, and upscale chill vibes. Aguilar and his brother, Luis, who grew up in Chiapas, made their name with the city’s first Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant, Casa Enrique. At Quique, Aguilar brings some of those dishes to Manhattan while turning up the heat, the elegance, the artfulness.

There is nothing dutiful or diminished about the menu at the vegan Caribbean restaurant HAAM, which is short for “healthy as a motha.” The “motha” in question is the restaurant’s chef-owner, Yesenia Ramdass, a mom of three from Washington Heights who got into veganism as a teen. At HAAM—though the name is pronounced like the meat—she devotes herself to re-creating plant-based versions of both Dominican favorites and dishes from her husband’s native Trinidad.

The signature dish here is the cold Himokawa udon. Served in a ceramic ring bowl, the noodles are beguilingly wide Möbius strips of silk: sleek, slippery, and impervious to even the most patient engagement with chopsticks. We recommend taking a bite with the readily supplied tongs before dunking it in the dipping sauce, not because the sauce isn’t good but because the diaphanous, bouncy streamers of wheat are best slurped without distraction.

Fidel Caballero, the chef-owner of Corima, grew up between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez. He builds his menu on a foundation of Northern Mexican ingredients—green chilis, plenty of cheese—but pulls in other elements: a bit of France, a bit of China, a whole heck of a lot of Japan. Corima’s menu is laced with uncommon Mexican ingredients such as chintixtle, a Oaxacan paste made from dried chilis and shrimp, and chicatanas, crisp flying ants that taste like salt and smoke.

Named somewhat unimaginatively after the building’s address, this joint is operated by the mega-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The kitchen is overseen by Jonathan Benno, a blue-chip chef who for a long time was the culinary No. 1 at Per Se. The bar menu is an album of the Jean-Georges restaurant group’s greatest hits; the dining room’s offerings are appropriately pitched to anticipate the desires of a clientele that wants to be pleased but not challenged.