Esquire Best New Restaurants 2025: The Complete Rankings

A ten-seat chef's counter in Little Tokyo, Restaurant Ki earned a Michelin star in 2025 within its first full year of operation. Chef Ki Kim, trained at Atomix and Jungsik in New York, delivers a seafood-centric tasting menu that draws on both Korean tradition and French technique. With a 4.9 Google rating and a place on Resy's 2025 Hit List, this is one of the most closely watched fine-dining openings in Los Angeles.

A Michelin Plate-recognised Californian farm-to-table restaurant in Westchester, Tomat operates an all-day format built around seasonal ingredients and a distinctive British-Persian culinary crossover. With a rooftop terrace, urban garden, and event space on West 87th Street, it earned a spot on Resy's 2025 Hit List — making it one of the more quietly consequential openings near LAX in recent memory.

Chef Toshi Kizaki's Michelin-starred omakase counter on South Pearl Street represents a career-defining commitment to edomae tradition, with an approximately 20-course menu spanning raw, cured, seared, and dry-aged fish preparations. After more than four decades shaping Denver's Japanese dining scene, Kizaki now operates at a different register entirely, placing the city on the map for serious omakase.

Opened in March 2025 in the East Village's former Momofuku Ko space, Kabawa brings a three-course Caribbean prix fixe to New York's tasting menu tier. Chef Paul Carmichael, Barbados-born and Momofuku-trained across Má Pêche and Sydney's Seiōbo, builds a menu of roti, braised goat, and coconut turnover that reads as regional memory made precise. New York Magazine named it among the 43 best restaurants in New York for 2025.

SUNN'S on Division Street sits at the quieter, more personal end of New York's Korean dining spectrum, where banchan and wine share equal billing. Chef-owner Sunny Lee's rotating shared plates draw from Korean pantry traditions, while a wine list overseen by Parcelle adds a considered pairing dimension rare in Chinatown's casual register.

A Michelin Plate-recognized tavern in Sewanee's historic warehouse district, Judith brings James Beard-nominated cooking to the Cumberland Plateau. Chef Julia Sullivan's seasonal American menu draws on regional sourcing and genuine hospitality, making it the most ambitious restaurant in a small university town that increasingly punches above its weight.

On North Euclid Avenue in the Central West End, MAINLANDER operates as an intimate supper club where mid-century Midwestern hospitality, French technique, and German comfort food converge with a distinct Taiwanese sensibility. The format is deliberately small-scale, with a focus on local farmers and makers that places it in a different register from St. Louis's better-known dining institutions.

Named Esquire's Restaurant of the Year for 2025, RVR is Travis Lett's Japanese-California izakaya on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, CA. Opened in October 2024, it brings together small plates, ramen, yakitori, and a vegetable-forward menu that draws as much from seasonal California produce as from the izakaya tradition. The drinks program pulls equal weight alongside the food.

At Sunny’s Steakhouse at Lot 6, the elemental allure of flame meets modern culinary precision. This refined steakhouse reimagines the classic chophouse with an elegant, wood-fired lens—showcasing rarefied cuts, pristine seafood, and seasonal produce rendered with quiet confidence. Guests are welcomed into a warmly lit room where polished service, a sommelier-led cellar, and tactile details create a sense of occasion from the first pour to the final, lingering bite. Whether indulging in a bespoke tasting progression, carving into marbled wagyu kissed by smoke, or retreating to an intimate alcove with a vintage decanter, Sunny’s balances sophistication with ease. It’s a sanctuary for discerning palates: convivial, meticulous, and effortlessly memorable.

Situated inside Printemps on Wall Street, Maison Passerelle is Chef Gregory Gourdet's downtown New York restaurant drawing on French, African, and Asian culinary traditions. The room pairs soaring frescoes and stained glass with an open kitchen and bold tilework. Named to Resy's Best of the Hit List in 2025, it represents one of Lower Manhattan's most compelling recent additions to the fine dining conversation.

A Michelin Plate-recognised restaurant and bar in downtown Gulfport, Siren Social Club pairs refined European cuisine with a raw bar program and tiki-inflected cocktails inside a space that reads as tropical speakeasy. Handmade pastas and gulf-adjacent sourcing sit alongside an ambitious drinks list, placing this among the more serious dining propositions on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

From Michelin-starred chef Johnny Curiel, Alteño brings the highland cuisine of Los Altos de Jalisco to Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood. Housed in the Clayton Hotel, the menu moves from bright aguachile and raw seafood plates through soulful tacos and shareable mains like bone-in Colorado lamb shank. The price point sits at the top of Denver's Mexican dining tier, with an atmosphere built around statement lighting and a confident regional identity.

Los Angeles's first craft molino operates inside Mercado La Paloma, nixtamalizing 100% Mexican heirloom corn daily to produce masa for a focused menu of antojitos rooted in Mexico City street-food tradition. Awarded a 2025 Michelin Bib Gourmand and ranked 38th on the LA Times 101 Best Restaurants 2024, Komal delivers some of the most technically grounded tortillas in the city at single-dollar price points.

BETSY is a live-fire neighborhood restaurant in Altadena, California, where wood-fired cooking over a centerpiece hearth drives a focused menu of rib-eyes, pork collar, and even cheesecake. The natural wine list is thoughtfully curated, and the atmosphere reads genuinely local rather than destination-seeking. Recognized on Resy's Best of the Hit List for 2025, it earns its place in Altadena's emerging dining conversation.

Vikas Khanna's East Village dining room brings contemporary Indian cooking across the country's 28 states, earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2024. Pale pink walls, carved bar panels, and vibrant murals establish an atmosphere closer to a colonial-era country club than a typical Manhattan Indian restaurant. Walk-in demand is high; reservations are strongly advised.

A West Oakland sourdough pizza operation running only two varieties at a time, June's Pizza earned a place on Esquire's Best New Restaurants in America 2025 list by doing exactly two things with precision: producing massive, properly crusted pies and transforming the room into a late-night dance party once the last slice is gone. Find it on Mandela Pkwy, where restraint and volume coexist.

A vinyl listening bar and modern American bistro on 19th Street, SIDE A brings high-fidelity audio and considered bistro cooking under one roof in San Francisco's Mission District. Recognised on Resy's 2025 Hit List and the San Francisco Chronicle's Best New Bay Area Restaurants of 2025, it represents a format gaining traction in American dining: the record bar as serious food destination.

KIKO brings an Asian-inflected perspective to Hudson Square, where chef Alex Chang and sommelier Lina Goujjane have built a menu that moves between global technique and Asian reference points with deliberate fluency. The Spring Street address puts it at the quieter southern edge of Manhattan's dining map, away from the Michelin-dense corridors to the north. It reads as a considered alternative within the city's crowded modern-Asian space.

A 1926 Montgomery Ward kit house on North Augusta Street is now one of the Shenandoah Valley's most serious tasting-menu destinations. Chef Ian Boden runs four-to-eight course dinners Thursday through Saturday by reservation only, pairing Virginia's seasonal larder with technically considered cooking. The adjoining inn means the whole evening, from first course to last sleep, unfolds under one roof.

Lei is a Chinese American wine bar on Doyers Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, recognized by Star Wine List's White Star and Resy's 2025 Hit List. The room fills fast — bottles stacked floor to ceiling, tables spilling into the alley — while the kitchen produces focused modern Chinese small plates alongside a deep list of low-intervention wines.

Named one of Esquire's Best New Restaurants in America for 2025, SEABOY is a ten-table chef-driven seafood spot on Cornelius's North Main Street. The kitchen draws on fresh, locally sourced ingredients from across the Carolinas, producing simple, honest cooking with a clear sustainability ethic. In a town better known for lake recreation than serious dining, it represents a meaningful shift in the area's culinary standing.

What began as a Ukrainian Village apartment project, with friends making free pizzas and posting them on Instagram, became one of Chicago's most talked-about openings of 2024. PIZZ'AMICI on Grand Ave specializes in cracker-thin tavern-style pizza, the style that defines Chicago's neighborhood pie tradition, served in a community-forward setting that still carries the energy of its underground origins.

On Ballard Avenue, Lupe's Situ Tacos merges Mexican and Lebanese culinary traditions into a format Seattle has made its own. The restaurant is known for crunchy tacos fried, stuffed, and sewn with toothpicks before a final pan-fry to a golden crisp — a preparation that references the owner's grandmother through the Arabic word 'situ.' Burritos and bowls round out a menu that operates at the crossroads of two distinct food cultures.

At 4636 NE 42nd Ave in Portland, Oregon, Javelina Indigenous Dining brings the food traditions of Turtle Island to the table through dishes like fry bread tacos and Hopi corn tamales. Chef Alexa Numkena-Anderson positions the menu as both a culinary record and an act of cultural reclamation, tracing ingredients and techniques back to their North American Indigenous origins. It occupies a distinct position in Portland's dining scene, where heritage-driven restaurants are reshaping what regional American cooking means.

Emeril's opened on Tchoupitoulas Street in 1990 and built a category of its own: New New Orleans cooking that placed Louisiana's produce at the centre of serious fine dining. Now holding two Michelin stars and a 2026 La Liste score of 92 points, the Warehouse District flagship operates under Chef E.J. Lagasse, whose tasting menu reframes the restaurant's founding classics through a lens shaped by Frantzén and Core by Clare Smyth.

ChòpnBlok brings West African cuisine into Houston's fast-casual conversation with precision and cultural specificity. Chef Ope Amosu's compact menu of bowls, salads, and snacks draws on Nigerian and broader West African flavors, from jollof jambalaya to suya-spiced beef skewers. Since opening its Westheimer Road location in October 2024, it has established itself as one of the city's more considered takes on accessible, flavor-forward dining.

Jules, on Fillmore Street in San Francisco's Lower Haight, earned spots on both Resy's 2025 Hit List and the San Francisco Chronicle's Best New Bay Area Restaurants list within its opening year. The kitchen anchors its menu in Bay Area ingredients and a dual heritage — Jewish and Italian — that shapes the pizza program in ways that set it apart from the city's other serious pie destinations.

On Girard Avenue in Fishtown, EMMETT works a specific culinary seam: Levantine cooking refracted through French, Italian, and North African registers, with ingredients sourced from regional Pennsylvania farms. The result is a dining room where the Mediterranean's eastern and western shores meet the mid-Atlantic's seasonal pantry — a combination that positions EMMETT distinctly within Philadelphia's increasingly confident restaurant scene.

LEO'S on Hickox Street brings an unusual combination to Santa Fe's dining scene: homestyle cooking drawn from Thai and Malaysian traditions, served alongside natural wines and experimental cocktails in a serene interior designed and crafted by Jonathan Boyd. It operates as a neighborhood restaurant and bar rather than a destination showcase, which in a city dominated by New Mexican and Southwestern formats makes it a quietly distinctive option for those seeking something outside the local canon.

On a corner of Bucktown's Armitage Avenue, MIRRA runs a cross-cultural menu that fuses Indian and Mexican cooking into something genuinely purposeful. Dum biryani with lamb barbacoa sits alongside scallop ceviche in fenugreek roti shells, backed by housemade achar and salsa tatemado. The exposed-brick dining room, open kitchen, and high-energy crowd make it one of Chicago's more compelling neighborhood dining propositions.

SORA CRAFT KITCHEN in Los Angeles serves contemporary Turkish-Mediterranean fare from a single, open kitchen. Must-try dishes include kitel dumplings, corti taplamasi (fermented-cabbage and bulgur dumpling soup), and grilled branzino with nori chimichurri. Chef Okay Inak prepares every plate solo, blending lacto-fermentation, slow-cooking, and precise French and Japanese techniques for layered, savory flavors. This 14-seat downtown counter feels like an invitation to a secret dinner party, where jars of pickles and the scent of tarhana butter heighten each bite. Critics praise its labor-of-love approach and regional storytelling; reservations are limited, making each seat a rare and memorable experience.

Bridges occupies a warm, amber-toned room on Chatham Square in Chinatown, where chef Sam Lawrence draws from global culinary traditions to produce a menu that resists easy categorisation. Awarded a Michelin Plate in 2025 and recognised by Star Wine List, the restaurant operates at a mid-premium price point that places it well below the city's starred tasting-menu circuit while cooking with comparable ambition.

Tamasha holds a 2025 Michelin Plate, placing it among a short list of recognized Indian restaurants in the American South. Located at Six Forks Road in North Raleigh, the restaurant applies contemporary technique to Indian cuisine inside a design-forward interior. Executive Chef Bhavin Chhatwani leads the kitchen, and the $$$-tier pricing reflects the ambition of the format.