15 Restaurants To Make You Fall In Love With New York Again

Chopped Parsley is the kind of small, scrappy restaurant you’d hope to find on every New York block, with fairy lights, an old-school hip hop-dominated soundtrack, and a small shrine to Prince on one wall. Opened in 2015 by Yumika Parsley (yes that is her ’80s Japanese band name), it’s a one-woman operation serving up warm onigiri and more homestyle Japanese food. Step in on Thursday-Saturday nights for piping hot ramen, or buttery, cod roe-clad spaghetti. Once your sake bottle is empty, get a slice of Yumika’s homemade matcha cheesecake.

VPho & Pizzeria used to be Sorrento’s, a slice shop that opened in 1973. Fifty years later when Sorrento was closing, Vietnamese neighbor Michael took it over, kept the pizza, and added a whole new menu. If you come here for one thing, it should be the stuffed-to-the-brim bánh mì đặc biệt, but you should never just get one thing. Where else can you experience the beauty of a bowl of penne alongside spicy phở sate?

It’s not quite farm to table, but at F. Ottomanelli, the distance from butcher counter to table is about six feet. Since 1932, the Ottomanelli family has kept New Yorkers’ fridges stocked with quality meat. Their cheerful Woodside burger joint, which opened in 2011, uses a juicy blend of chuck, short rib, and brisket. You can also pick out a steak from behind the glass and have it cooked on the spot for no additional charge. The excellent fries cost extra, but the top-tier banter is on the house.

Happy coincidences abound in NYC. Maybe you found a loaded subway card or ran into that now-single ex-coworker. But if life has been feeling a little less serendipitous lately, head to Cocina Consuelo. The Hamilton Heights restaurant grew out of a Dominican and Mexican couple’s pandemic supper club, and it feels DIY in the best of ways. (You might even leave with a recommendation for a great local daycare or hear a performance from a jazz saxophonist who used to jam with Duke Ellington.) But the difference between Cocina Consuelo and a regular old apartment party is that the food and drinks—pineapple espresso and fluffy masa pancakes for brunch, birria-topped bone marrow and Mexican wine at dinner—are far more serious.

Eating grilled seafood in a backyard surrounded by bright flower boxes and Greek flags is the dining equivalent of getting a massage while watching your comfort rom-com with a fire crackling in the background. There’s something just so calming about eating at Elias Corner, a Greek seafood spot in Astoria. They don’t have a menu—when you walk in, you’ll be greeted by a deli case full of the fish you’ll be eating (either grilled or fried) later that night. Their options change daily, but no matter what, start with fried sardines and octopus, and make sure to ask for vinegar on the side. Elias Corner isn’t the only restaurant like this in Astoria, but it’s a bit quieter than the others, save for the tables full of multi-generational families sharing cheap bottles of wine.

Inside this Cobble Hill restaurant, you’ll find six tables, 17 seats, and one man who runs the show. His nickname is Lillo, and he works his way around the dining room, greeting guests, taking orders, and recommending a spot in Rome that makes the very best carbonara in the world. You might wonder how a place like this—cash-only, no bathroom, no alcohol—even exists. But once you taste Lillo’s beautifully simple dishes (almost all under $20), like sauteed artichokes swimming in olive oil, and a saucy rigatoni alla gricia, you'll understand why it's been going strong since 2017. Get a heap of tiramisu before leaving.

The pizza discourse in NYC is tangled and fierce, and the top slice shops are often packed with those judging crust-to-sauce ratios with the use of a ring light. When you need to get away, head to Amore. We aren’t going to tell you that this Flushing spot makes the absolute best pizza in the city. That sort of talk has no place here. (But, you know, you could make the argument.) Amore is just Amore. It’s a no-nonsense joint in a strip mall where friendly-enough employees have been churning out consistently perfect pies since the 1970s. The cheese is greasy, the lights are fluorescent, and the crust-to-sauce ratio is, yes, on point.

If it’s skyscrapers and traffic noises that put NYC on your sh*t list, Kashkar Cafe is pretty much as far removed from those as you can get. The Uyghur restaurant is in Brighton Beach, so you can combine a visit with some tanning, or a polar plunge, depending on the season. Once the waves have washed away your anxiety, walk a block off the water to Kashkar, where you'll find some of the city's most comforting, reassuring food, like stir-fried, lamb-filled bosu lagman, and juicy veal kebabs. With your stomach full and your soul warmed—by way of cumin, and the YouTube carousel of Central Asian choirs on their TV—you’ll be ready to once again go back to ignoring the nightly wailing of various emergency vehicles.

According to legend, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray was invented in Brooklyn in 1868. A few decades later, the knish took off on the Lower East Side. Then, in 1952, the original Knish Nosh was established in Queens. Today, you can still stop by the shop—now in Rego Park—and enjoy a very historically New York City meal that consists of dense, pastry-wrapped potato with a side of celery soda. Would you like some pierogi? Trick question. You don’t have a choice. Chef Anna is empathic: You must have some brisket, folded into soft, doughy shells that vary in shape from half-moon to oblong. The carmelized onions on top provide a hint of sweetness, and a half quart of ruby red borscht will help keep you hydrated as you plow through your dumplings at the long counter.

By design, a visit to La Morada in Mott Haven takes you out of your boring daily routine: the restaurant with an activist heart and a selection of lick-the-plate-clean moles is only open on weekdays, until 5pm. It’s the perfect excuse to play hooky, or take a long lunch break on a work-from-home day. Have a seat in the canteen-like space and rifle through various pamphlets for causes they support, while digging into a hearty meal of Oaxacan classics, like chicken in a clove-heavy mole oaxaqueño, or daily specials, like albondigas stuffed with green olives. If your weeknight dinner routine needs a little shaking up too, take home some fresh tortillas and a container of mole poblano—it’s a great base for any protein you want to add in.

It could be your neighbor, your dentist, or your Uber driver, but someone you’ve met grew up going to this Chino Latino spot, and loves their platter of boneless chicken cracklings, squeezed over with lemon and dipped in a not-so-secret green sauce. Inside, old framed photos of celebrity visitors line the walls, and large booths fill up with Upper West Siders who have been eating fried pork chops in this exact spot since it opened in 1986. Come for big plates of Chino Latino classics, rum-based nutcracker cocktails garnished with maraschino cherries, and a general feeling that the world isn’t completely f*cked after all. A lot has changed on 72nd Street, but La Dinastia remains.

This tiny East Harlem restaurant is the only place we know where you can browse through shelves of vintage denim clothing, listen to Thai psychedelic rock, and drink BYOB beer with your friends while waiting for your food. Bangklyn’s owner—who, among other things, founded a vintage clothing fair in Bangkok—cooks dishes to order behind a counter, and though the menu is short and mostly geared towards takeout, you’ll find plenty to fill your table and satisfy your hunger too. Get the fried tofu or chicken, and the tamarind noodles with crab, and add on a few more dishes depending on how many people you bring. It’s an unusually lo-fi, hand-crafted spot for Manhattan, and it feels like it belongs in a version of NYC that’s still for the dreamers.

B&H Dairy, a tiny kosher spot on 2nd Ave., is the kind of place where you can walk in with today's copy of The Times under your arm, make conversation with the people next to you, and be transported to a previous East Village era. It’s been around since the 1940s, and there’s something about eating an overstuffed tuna sandwich on their airy, baked-in-house challah bread, or eight perfect pierogies, that leads to thoughts about how everyone from Lou Reed to Keith Haring might have refueled here, after a late-night show around the corner. The menu of diner and Eastern European classics is long, but it’s dwarfed by the sense of pride and loyalty that long-time East Villagers have for this place.

Perhaps the most useful perk of living in New York is how easily you can get a big, saucy bowl of carbs and cheese when you need it. There are a lot of spots where you can make big hand gestures and ask for “mod-zarell,” but one of our favorites is a low-key restaurant on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx, opened by a married couple in 2002, though it feels much older. The Italian-born husband cooks carbonara, while his very NY wife is Tra Di Noi’s head host, enthusiastically explaining the chalkboard specials. This place has all the checkered-tablecloth charm you want from “the real Little Italy,” without becoming a caricature of the genre. Get whichever seafood special the next table over keeps gushing about.

Filled to the brim with framed art, skeleton toys, ruffled piñatas, and other knick-knacks, this East Harlem restaurant looks like the Mexico City mercado of your dreams, or a TikTok trap. But after a meal at El Kallejon, it’s clear that there was no social media strategy involved in its creation—just a few hoarder tendencies and a lot of love for the motherland. The tapas are just as colorful as the digs, with Japanese, French, and Mediterranean influences mixed into beautifully presented dishes like escargots in pasilla sauce and bubbling huitlacoche shiitake flatbreads. The owner, who occasionally dons a lucha libre mask, will pour you a very heavy mezcal while you wait for your lovingly prepared food.

A restaurant that’s also a decades-long art installation, Mombar has been a fixture in Astoria’s Little Egypt since 2000. Thickly plastered with found objects, mosaics, and Egyptian motifs, it’s part-MoMA and part Temple of Dendur, with some hippy touches, like booths separated by bedsheets. The artist/chef is also the host, and he’ll come over to tell you what’s available, then go back behind a counter to cook your dinner. With simple, homey dishes, partly microwaved to order, this is above all just a place to exist among other people. You won’t be rushed out—if anything you might wait awhile for food on a busy night—so bring a couple of bottles of wine, and settle in for an evening that’s the antidote to all those overly orchestrated restaurant meals.