Bar Kabawa
CITY GUIDES | NEW YORK CITY
The Best New Restaurants in Manhattan Right Now
A dozen new Manhattan openings worth your time, your money, and obsessively refreshing Resy.
By Maria Rodriguez | Dec. 29, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Barcelona to Bakersfield.
New restaurants are my favorite kind of New York sport, and it’s one I’m obsessed with tracking. I follow openings the way other people track free agency: who’s behind it, what’s on the menu, and which chef is responsible for the dish I keep seeing on Instagram.
This guide is the result: the Manhattan restaurants worthy of a reservation tonight. These are the places I keep seeing booked solid, the ones getting argued about in group chats and on Facebook foodie pages. I’ll update this list regularly, because New York does not sit still, and neither do its restaurants.
These are the ones I would send you to first if you told me you had one free night in the city: the best new restaurants in Manhattan right now.
Bánh Anh Em
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Chef-owners Nhu Ton and John Nguyen built this East Village spin-off around two obsessions: bánh mì bread with real crackle and fresh rice noodles that taste like somebody cared about every detail. I would start with a bánh mì, then move to a noodle dish like bún riêu. The room has the feel of a young New York restaurant that expects you to eat fast and come back soon.
Best for: A quick noodles-and-sandwiches run
Bartolo
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Chef Ryan Bartlow followed Ernesto’s with this West Village spot that borrows its personality from Madrid taverns and its appetite from people who order “one more thing” four times. The menu jumps from pan soplao bread pillows and ajo blanco to heavier moves like tripe with morcilla and braised oxtail with fried potatoes. I would sit at the bar, order something with jamón, and pretend I am only staying for one drink.
Best for: A bar seat that turns into a late night
Bistrot Ha
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Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns gave the city a proper follow-up to Ha’s Snack Bar, and it reads like a bistro written in their handwriting. You come for martinis and Vietnamese-leaning French comfort, with dishes that can veer from steak frites to something like a curried lobster-and-sweetbreads vol-au-vent. The vibe is downtown-casual but food-serious, which is the only combination that really works on Eldridge.
Best for: A martini-led dinner with real kitchen energy
Chateau Royale
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From Francophile Cody Pruitt and the Libertine team, Chateau Royale is the sort of French theater that’ll makes me wistful for the Parisian nights that I’ve only actually seen from Emily in Paris. Head upstairs in the converted brownstone for the cold, engineered chateau martini and dishes like beggar’s purse or filet au poivre, then downstairs when you want dinner to feel more important. It is expensive and calibrated for people who like their make-believe with thick linen tablecloths.
Best for: Celebratory dinners where the martini is the main course
Danny & Coop’s
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If you’ve been on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or, basically, the internet in the past year, then you probably saw the single sandwich sold by Danny & Coop’s. The $18 cheesesteak is a hefty 12-incher built on a sesame-seeded roll, with paper-thin rib-eye, ribbons of griddled onion, and Cooper Sharp doing the glossy, molten work. Stand in line for ungodly amounts of time, eat leaning on a narrow counter, and leave understanding why New York will wait an hour for something it could have ignored.
Best for: A lunch mission that ends with cheese on all parts of you
The Eighty Six
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Chef Michael Vignola’s steakhouse at the old Chumley’s address is a small, polished room that wants you to believe you stumbled into a private club with better lighting. The menu leans classic steakhouse, but the drinks are where it winks, including a house martini that shows up with buttered toast. I would order the waldorf salad, commit to a steak, and accept that the reservation will feel more dramatic than your actual evening plans.
Best for: A hard-to-book table that feels like a status symbol
Hwaro
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Hwaro is chef Sungchul Shim’s chef’s counter in Midtown, with a circular 22-seat room built for a 13-course $295 tasting menu. It sits in the same Times Square space as his steakhouse, Gui, and it is named for a Korean stove, which tells you it is aiming for heat, precision, and a little ceremony. This is the kind of meal you book when you want dinner to feel like an event and you do not want to make a single decision once you sit down.
Best for: A splurge tasting menu with zero improvisation
Kabawa
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Chef Paul Carmichael finally has a Manhattan dining room where his Caribbean cooking reads loud, and proud. Backed by the Momofuku folks, the format is a $145 prix fixe that encourages you to treat the table like a choose-your-own-adventure, then argue about which course was the best. It feels like the point is not just the food, but the sense that you are in on something the moment you walk in. Bonus: There’s also the rum-forward Bar Kabawa, with drinks and snacks that skew Caribbean and salty, which is exactly how I like my nights to start.
Best for: A group dinner where everyone orders differently
Lei
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Annie Shi’s Lei is a wine-first sliver of a room on Doyers where you can nerd out over bottles and still eat a real meal if you insist. I would build the table around the sticky short rib glazed with strawberry jam, shao bing stuffed with cold butter, and the hand-rolled cat’s ear noodles that show up buried in herbs. The mood is date-friendly but not precious, and the list is long enough to reward curiosity.
Best for: A wine night that still includes food worth remembering
Limusina
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Michael Stillman’s three-story Mexican restaurant is big, loud, and built like a party you can eat, with chef Craig Koketsu steering the kitchen. The menu leans into crowd-pleasers like lobster al pastor, quesabirria, and dessert that includes jelly-donut conchas, which tells you it is not interested in being subtle. I would bring a group, order broadly, and let the room do the work.
Best for: A birthday dinner that wants a soundtrack
Muku
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Chef Manabu Asanuma’s 14-seat kaiseki counter in Tribeca is a tight, exacting experience that serves as a way to highlight the skill of a talented chef. The $295 tasting menu can move through hairy crab tomato soup, foie gras chawanmushi, and soba in duck broth, which is a neat summary of how Japanese fine dining can still surprise you in New York. It is calm, intimate, and exacting, which means don’t book it on a night when you want to talk over your food.
Best for: A quiet, high-end tasting with maximum precision
Taishoken
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The legendary Tokyo ramen restaurant now has an East Village outpost built around tsukemen, which means thick noodles served with a separate dipping broth that tastes like it has been reducing since noon. The point is the rhythm of the meal: dip, slurp, repeat, then add a little broth at the end and turn what is left into a final soup. It is open late, which makes it the rare restaurant that respects the reality of New York schedules.
Best for: Late-night ramen that is actually an excellent plan
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