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The Best Food of 2025 (So Far)
Photo: Hugo Yu/
The details that make a great restaurant — the staff, the linens, the crowd, the ever-elusive “feel” — are practically infinite in both number and variety. But six months into 2025, we asked our chief critic and our “Underground Gourmet” columnist to narrow their focus a bit, to instead tell us about the individual dishes they loved and haven’t stopped thinking about. They answered with this list of ten sandwiches, squab platters, fresh-baked scones, and more.
The Best Banh Mi
Banh Anh Em, 99 Third Ave.
There are just two components to this sandwich, both deceptively complex. It starts with a banh mi roll, baked on the premises, as perfect as I’ve ever had, with a light-brown crust crackling around a nearly weightless crumb. It’s split lengthwise and smeared with a slightly coarse Vietnamese pâté, a fine-tuned recipe of pork and chicken liver soaked overnight in heavy cream that’s then slowly cooked for three hours with ground pork and crispy shallots. It’s seasoned with fish sauce, peppercorns, and a fiery-red four-month-fermented hot sauce that also comes on the side. Eating this was the first time I’ve wanted a glass of red wine at a Vietnamese restaurant, which thankfully they serve as well. –T.T.
Super-Luxe Squab
Le Chêne, 76 Carmine St.
It’s a tall order to get New Yorkers onboard with squab — the little birds are the young, farm-raised versions of what we see on our streets every day as … pigeons. Kudos, then, to chef Alexia Duchêne, who just might manage it: The tender, magical bird was the standout of our recent meal at the restaurant she’s opened with her husband, wine director Ronan Duchêne. With its perfectly red, rare breast and cognac-sticky little legs and wings, the squab left my entire table swooning. I was so enraptured I failed to notice that the cross-hatched, seared-off wedges served under it were not, in fact, mushrooms, but lobes of foie, so decadent I thought that I, like they, might melt. –M.S.
A Puerto Rican Pork Chop
Kabawa, 8 Extra Pl.
So many things stuck with me from Paul Carmichael’s Kabawa duo (fine-dining Kabawa, Bar Kabawa next door) that I was hard-pressed to pick just one. Should it be the dressed-up patties, savory with short rib, conch, and bone marrow, fried to a flaking crisp and even better when sandwiched in a marshmallow loaf of coco bread? His buss up shut, loose rags of Trini roti served with a trio of chutneys? A boudin-like duck sausage “jerked” into the heights of fruity-heat heaven? It could’ve been any, but in the event of a six-way tie, the win goes to the biggest: an almost pornographically large scroll of sliced pork chop, chuletas can can, borrowed from Puerto Rico, fatty but not incapacitating, peppery but not scalding, all around fabulous. –M.S.
Scones That Always Sell Out
Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread Shop, 93 ½ E. 7th St.
It was one of the coldest days in January when I first tried these, when the early-morning scent of butter and berries wafted down a relatively deserted East Village block. I still think about these scones every day. In theory, Irish soda bread is an extremely simple recipe, but anyone who has tried one of these will agree that the magic is in Mary O.’s hands. Batches are baked throughout the morning, which ensures that each scone is as fresh as can be, aided by a thick slice of salted butter and a juicy, homemade blackberry preserve spread down the split middle. –T.T.
Game-Changing Onion Rings
Onion Tree Pizza Co., 214 First Ave.
Chef Jay Jadeja loves dosas but hadn’t considered himself skilled enough at making the crisp pancakes to put them on the menu at his Indian pizza kitchen. Instead of making a so-so dosa, he uses the same fermented-rice batter to coat thick rings of onion. They’re fried and stacked up with a duo of chutneys — one savory coconut and thick, the other a refreshing cilantro. The batter makes the rings puff up like mini-doughnuts with a properly crisp exterior, while slices of red onion provide more pronounced flavor than white onion would. It’s an ingenious combination, and I’m surprised I haven’t (yet) seen it in more places. –T.T.
Michael White’s Mushroom Pasta
Santi, 11 E. 53rd St.
The genteel atmosphere of this Midtown East dining room — the esoteric-aristo art collection, the Important lighting fixtures, the hushed gliding of the jacketed staff — ought to inspire starchy, perfect politesse. Good luck maintaining your composure. Michael White, one of the city’s elder maestri of pasta-making, has proven he’s still got what it takes to more than keep up with his successor-competitors in the field. I never had a bad pasta at Santi, but the one I still think about is (unusually for me) White’s vegetarian mushroom busiate. The earthy reek of truffle shows its hand a mile off, but just as good are the ordinarily humble trumpet mushrooms he tosses with his spiraling noodles. I’m not the only one who’s sold on this combo: According to the staff when I reviewed it this spring, this pasta is the restaurant’s best seller. –M.S.
A New Favorite Butter Chicken …
Kebab aur Sharab, 247 W. 72nd St.
Yes, this restaurant opened in the waning days of 2022, but it’s lately become somewhat fashionable for upscale Indian restaurants to serve their take on butter chicken, and this restaurant serves two. One is more similar to the standard curry, and the other is a kebab version, made to emulate a recipe from Aslam Chicken in old Delhi. Marinated dark meat is skewered and caramelized in a tandoor and plated on a broken sauce of hot butter and cream, finished with a spice blend composed of yellow chile, chaat masala, and black salt. The best accompaniment is a neatly folded roomali roti, which gets its pliable softness from green bananas in the dough. –T.T.
… And Some New Favorite Wings
Samyan, 848 Fulton St., Clinton Hill
The wings at this new Brooklyn Thai spot are the closest thing I’ve found to the still-talked-about Vietnamese wings served at the long-gone Pok Pok on the Columbia waterfront. And if you want to know the truth, these are better. The deliciousness comes from the technique: Using only the flats, each wing is split into two single-boned “winglets,” effectively doubling the surface area for crunch and flavor. Once breaded and fried with a crust that doesn’t fall off, they are glazed with a concentrated lacquer of sweet and salty caramelized fish sauce. –T.T.
A Surprising Seafood Sandwich
Jō, 127 E. 34th St.
I didn’t expect Jō, in any way. I didn’t expect the low-lit, serene counter to be revealed behind a heavy metal door on an uninspiring strip of East 34th Street. I didn’t expect to be in one of just two pairs of diners I laid eyes on all night. I didn’t expect the wonders (thin slices of fermented carp with a powerful Cheez Doodle umami, oysters lazing in buttered soy) prepared by one chef and (as far as I ever saw) one sous. And I didn’t expect to be enthused about a saba — that is, mackerel — sandwich, served fish-gamey and oily between two planks of shokupan crisped over charcoal. And yet, here I am. Why aren’t we talking more about Jō, the happy return to New York of Hiroki Abe, who for years made the exquisite vegan Shojin specialties (Zen Buddhist temple cooking) at much-missed Kajitsu? I really didn’t expect the master of vegan to take to meat and fish with the gusto he has, but as he said to me, shrugging, “I eat everything.” –M.S.
And for Dessert: The Most Vanilla Ice Cream
Zimmi’s, 72 Bedford St.
It seems like a troll. Can the best dessert I’ve had all year really be … ice cream? And not just that, but vanilla ice cream? To this I say: yes. Chef Maxime Pradié supercharges vanilla in a way I’ve never before encountered, offering an ice cream that is so unbelievably beaned that it’s literally gray. (Take that, little black vanilla flecks in Breyers.) It’s currently offered as part of a trio of flavors, but I preferred the original presentation, starkly solo with nothing more than a few golden little suns of shortbread. Might I petition for their return? –M.S.
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