At Ilis, every server is also a cook, and the ingredients are often hand-foraged. This Greenpoint restaurant is like a dinner party hosted in a candlelit warehouse. Meals start at five courses, with offerings that include smoked eel meant to be eaten like corn on the cob, and a whole trout with miso butter baked in birch bark. The food as seasonal as it gets, and the employees will gladly answer any questions, such as “Can I eat the flower that I just used as a paintbrush?” (The answer is yes.)

When you feel like you’ve seen, done, and eaten all that NYC’s overwhelming omakase scene can offer, go to The Office of Mr. Moto. This St. Mark’s speakeasy is filled with eclectic Japanese antiques and requires you to decode an email before your visit. The 21-course meal ($180) is focused on hyper-seasonal ingredients flown in daily from Japan, so expect pieces like shirako, or rare red gurnard that you don’t get at other sushi spots in this price range.

Au Za’atar is justly famous on social media for their tableside shawarma towers, and it’s pretty damn satisfying to slice the chicken or lamb off the vertical spit yourself, again and again. Au Za’atar’s other Lebanese classics are also excellent, especially the creamy labneh topped with olives and a slick of olive oil, and the mixed grill platter with sumac-dusted fries. Go with a couple of people, get a bottle of Lebanese wine, and call ahead to order that shawarma tower.

You aren’t technically dining at Calabria Pork Store, since you take your sandwiches to go, but just entering this Arthur Avenue salumeria is an experience. Hundreds of soppressata hang from the ceiling, with a sweet, musky smell that shocks the system every time. Any meat you pull from the sausage chandelier will be your new favorite food. We tend to go for the store’s specialty, hot soppressata, served on ciabatta or a hero roll.

This little Egyptian seafood market and restaurant in Astoria has a counter in the back where you point at exactly what you want to eat. The daily selection usually includes a few types of whole fish as well as baby octopus, squid, and a few kinds of shrimp. Specify how you’d like them cooked (baked, fried, grilled, etc.) and wait patiently for some of the best food you’ve eaten off of plastic plates. Abuqir doesn’t have much ambience but that doesn’t really matter.

Kono is a sleek, serious yakitori restaurant with a crown-to-tail approach to serving chicken. Once the skewers start rolling in this omakase meal, you’ll get everything from heart and liver to inner thigh and chicken oyster, each with a distinct flavor. A resin model of their chochin skewer—a dainty stack of fallopian tube, liver, and an unfertilized egg—will appear mid-meal with several other interesting add-ons. Order at least a few.

It’s tough enough to find an apartment large enough to host a family-only bat mitzvah for your cat, let alone a quality group meal. So book a spot at this Fort Greene restaurant instead, and mingle with friends and strangers over an unpretentious, pre-fixe menu at a communal table with taper candles and mismatched cups of wine. Sure, you might wind up with the dreaded NFT Guy at your table instead of your new crush, but that’s part of the fun.

This Bed-Stuy restaurant serves a four-course, prix-fixe meal twice nightly in a room off of Nostrand Avenue where you’ll eat new takes on Nigerian food at a communal table with strangers. Before each course, the chef comes out to set the scene around what you’re about to eat like he’s narrating Forrest Gump, with a few funny stories and insightful anecdotes thrown in. Nigerian records spin, and people share their BYOB selections with the table, making for one of our favorite dinner parties.

A restaurant with an all-chocolate menu seems like the sort of thing you’d find in Times Square trying to recruit diners from the M&M’s store. But this Mott Haven outpost from a fourth-generation Puerto Rican chocolate company pulls off their concept without feeling like an Iron Chef challenge. Go for a lively brunch spot where you can sip on chocolate Bloody Marys, or come by for one of their popular salsa nights to eat chalupitas de mofongo served with chocolate-flecked guacamole.

A meal at Tokyo Record Bar is only partially about the food. Mostly, you come for the experience. There are several seatings here every night, and the first thing you do when you sit down is help pick the playlist. Everything is on vinyl, and you’ll get to choose a song that you want to hear. Then, a seven-course tasting menu will begin, and you’ll eat some izakaya-type food while you (and roughly 20 other people) listen to a collaborative playlist in a small basement on MacDougal Street.