The Best Things I Ate in 2025

Trends in restaurants are like trends in art: cumulative, ambient, much more evident in retrospect than they are in the chaos of the present. If 2024 was the year that the French resurgence really took hold, bathing New York City in cream and caviar, maybe 2025 was the year of the scrappy, auteurish indie: restaurants with tight, potent, personal points of view (and tight, nearly impossible-to-get-into dining rooms). I’m thinking of places like Sunn’s, Ha’s Snack Bar, and Bong, where the relational experience of having a meal is less about being a person at a table and more about being a person in a room—being part of something, a moment, a place. For every timid, focus-grouped, over-designed brand expansion, there were half a dozen green shoots of passionate, community-facing, community-building dining rooms and takeout counters. On balance, this was an awfully good year for restaurants. I mean, yes, it was also a horrible one—beset by the chilling, wide-ranging effects of tariff uncertainty and vituperative ICE raids, and the rising costs of real estate, equipment, and ingredients—but the culinary world moved forward so relentlessly, so creatively nonetheless.

But the following is a list of best dishes, not of best restaurants. Thinking about the year in terms of individual plates is always a challenge for me, and also a thrill. So much of one’s experience at a restaurant is contextual, dependent on the arc and flow of a meal, and singling out any one specific creation or sensory experience forces me to take stock in a more granular, almost animalistic way. Which dishes gave me a jolt of surprise? Which made me close my eyes with joy? Which lit up my synapses with sheer pleasure and satiety? No dish or bite can exist in a total vacuum: I think the very best single thing I put in my mouth all year was a regular old strawberry, raw and red, but so jewel-like, so sweet and flavorful that the flesh almost betrayed hints of vanilla and cream. The berry was part of a brunch-time fruit plate at Gjelina—though, importantly, it was the Gjelina in Venice Beach, where the restaurant is sun-drenched and low-slung, and not the new multistory location that opened in New York this year and almost immediately disappeared into the beige, luxe blandness of its ritzy NoHo block. I think, too, about the cucumber salad served at Golden Hof, the terrific new midtown Korean restaurant from the owners of downtown’s wonderful Golden Diner. The dish is a beautiful, arguably brilliant mess, like two salads in one, with crisp cukes dressed in a burned-sesame vinaigrette, and fresh cilantro tossed in a dressing made with puckery gochugaru, combined in a bowl with a shower of crispy fried garlic. Eaten on the restaurant’s main level, in the louder, more casual bar area, it’s one of the most raucous, exciting vegetable dishes I’ve had in recent memory. Unfortunately, the austerity and elegance of the downstairs dining room acts as a dampener, hushing the salad’s brashness and sapping much of the fun. All dishes, inevitably, are products of their environment.

Nevertheless! Here, in no particular order, are a dozen of the best dishes I ate this year, considered more or less on their own terms. (Respectably, for me, only three of them are sandwiches.)