In 1973, the New York Times restaurant critic John L. Hess gave Chinatown — the entire neighborhood — four stars. It was the highest rating he ever dispensed, and an acknowledgment that whether you eat poorly or well can depend less on the skills of a particular chef than on your openness to experience.
I’d extend those stars to all of New York City, home to almost every cuisine on earth, each claiming a tenuous foothold in an ever-shifting landscape. The surest way to a memorable meal is to walk the streets: to trawl the sidewalks of southern Brooklyn all the way down to the Coney Island Boardwalk; to follow the No. 7 train through Queens to its end, and beyond; to pop into each bodega along the way in case there’s a secret taqueria at the back; to point at a menu written in a language you don’t know, make a wild guess and hope for the best.
Here are the favorite small restaurants from a year of wandering, chosen by me and my Hungry City colleagues, Marian Bull and Mahira Rivers. They’re idiosyncratic spots, often family-run, sometimes direly understaffed, erratic in hours and quality but, when stumbled upon at the right moment, surpassing the loftiest of dining rooms in generosity of spirit — the kind of places that make living and eating in this city a perpetual revelation.
The name is bland, inherited from the previous tenant, a Chinese takeout shop. But the food is distinct: Burmese dishes rarely found in New York City, each an incantation of ingredients chosen and prepared for maximal juxtaposition. Fresh and pickled, juicy and dried, roasted and crisped, powdery and lush, airy and dense, shattered and whole — the flavors and textures multiply, in curries gentle and furious, cooling salads that find every shade of sourness, and noodles shining with melted pork fat (to be cut by a cleansing sip of soup).
When Kyaw Lin Htin and his wife, Aye Thida, took over the restaurant in February, the plan was for him to make sushi, the trade he learned when he first came to the United States, while she recreated the food her family served at their restaurants in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital. Burmese dishes were relegated to a corner of the menu, until customers begged for more. LIGAYA MISHAN
101-11 Queens Boulevard (67th Road), Forest Hills, Queens; 718-275-1888; no website.
Pierre Thiam grew up in Dakar, Senegal, and came to the United States three decades ago in hopes of studying physics. Instead, the kitchen called. Now he oversees high-end restaurants in Dakar and Lagos, Nigeria, along with Yolele Foods, an importer of fonio, an ancient African grain with a texture like crumbled cloud.
At this serene cafeteria that opened in February in the lobby of the Africa Center, on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, low-slung chairs and tables built from repurposed refrigerators nestle among frilly palms and trailing vines. Long wooden tables run down the middle, where diners commune over Mr. Thiam’s vivid precolonial West African dishes: malleable boulders of fufu, boiled plantains pounded under a steady stream of palm oil; egusi, traditionally a cassava-leaf stew, here made with collards, honoring the influence of the African-American diaspora; and fonio stained crimson by jollof, tomatoes broken down with a crush of baobab leaves and whole Scotch bonnets. LIGAYA MISHAN
1280 Fifth Avenue (110th Street), East Harlem; 212-444-9795; itsteranga.com.
This modest restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, is run by a family whose members span three generations. Irma Vargas is the face of the business, and is often joined in the kitchen by her mother and her daughters (and sometimes her husband). Mrs. Vargas uses family recipes to make pupusas, a popular street food in El Salvador, where she was born. She also makes a handful of tacos and tamales using recipes from her husband, who is from Mexico.
Everything here takes time, starting with the family’s daily commute from Long Island, but a spirit of generosity endures. Pupusas are stuffed to the brim with any combination of the ingredients at hand. The most popular choice is the revueltas, a mix of Salvadoran chicharrón (braised pork mash), cheese and beans tucked into a ball of masa and patted into a neat, palmable package. MAHIRA RIVERS
47-55 47th Street (48th Avenue), Sunnyside, Queens; 929-296-0069; no website.
Each dish at this Thai restaurant has the effect of a lit-up, all-systems-go pinball machine: A single bite pings from sweet to sour to salty to funky to crunchy to sweet, tied together with a gleeful ding-ding-ding! of pleasure. The crispy rice salad, its grains formed into perfumed balls that are fried until deep brown, is then broken apart and tossed with a tangy, brilliant dressing and a handful of torn sour sausage. It’s the sort of thing you want to hoover.
Chiraporn Sornphoom, an owner and manager, opened the restaurant in 2017 with two of her sisters and a friend, in hopes of sharing the food of their native Isan region with Queens. They make their own pla ra, the rabidly funky fermented fish sauce, in house, a process that takes three to four months. The oceanic liquor pops up in an array of papaya salads, many studded with salted or preserved sea creatures, leaning into brininess. MARIAN BULL
77-16 Woodside Avenue (78th Street), Elmhurst, Queens; 929-328-0392; hugesannyc.com.
The food of Iraq is not widely known in America, despite the decades-long tangle of our countries’ fates, and few New York menus have ever showcased the cuisine. But since July, Mohammed Almandalawi — the Mississippi-born son of Iraqi immigrants — has been cooking the dishes of his childhood at this bare-bones restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is home to a growing Arab population.
Lamb is celebrated in dish after dish: indulgently braised hunks of shoulder and shank arrayed over golden rice musky from cardamom; ground lamb tucked inside hollowed-out orbs of onion and trunks of eggplant, a process so labor-intensive that Mr. Almandalawi reserves it for weekends; and lamb broth, plush on the tongue, suffusing bamia, a slow breakdown of okra and tomatoes. For now, offerings are few (and sometimes sell out). Be patient, for Mr. Almandalawi is the restaurant’s entire staff, waiting tables, writing down orders and then hurrying back to the kitchen to cook them. LIGAYA MISHAN
7215A Third Avenue (72nd Street), Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; 718-833-3338; no website.
This single-minded enterprise is devoted to cheong fun, broad floppy rice noodles, translucent and almost gooey, rolled around nubs of pork, beef or shrimp (plump or dried into briny knots), scallions and cilantro, crunchy bean sprouts and glimmers of corn. Versions bought from street carts tend to be snacks, the fillings slightly impressionistic; here, cheong fun is a meal, especially when mottled with egg or half-submerged in a sauce of peanut butter, vinegar and sesame paste, with curry fish balls staggered across it like a game of marbles.
Joe Rong, a native of Taishan in Guangdong Province, China, grinds rice daily in electric stone mills to achieve noodles of remarkable pliancy and earthiness. What started out in 2017 as a rough-and-ready food stand in a mini-mall in Flushing, Queens, may now be on the brink of empire, with an outpost at the Canal Street Market in Manhattan and a stand-alone restaurant in the East Village (temporarily closed for renovations). LIGAYA MISHAN
136-21 Roosevelt Avenue (Main Street), Flushing, Queens, and two other locations; 646-203-7380; steamriceroll.com.
At the back of a 24/7 grocery, this weekend micro-taquería is all about the comales taqueros, square cooktops with domed centers that allow the cooks to sweep each tortilla through a burbling vat of rendered, green onion-infused fat before flipping it repeatedly, waiting for the moment until it’s just charred enough to become a taco. This process means that each taco — like the one with staggeringly tender goat barbacoa — carries with it an echo of the tripe and suadero lazing about at the edges of the comal.
The taco program is the brainchild of Jesus Fuentes, a butcher from Veracruz, Mexico, who began making rustic meats here, like barbacoa and carnitas, in the style of the country’s villages. And while the tacos are the stars here, Fuentes and his cooks shower the same amount of attention onto the consomé, a smoky, brothy goat soup served up from a furtive crock behind the comales. MARIAN BULL
81-06 Roosevelt Avenue (81st Street), Jackson Heights, Queens; 718-205-3280; no website.
This Peruvian restaurant is a testament to endurance: It opened in 2011 on the Upper West Side; relocated to Astoria, Queens, in 2015 when the rents got too high; and finally settled in Jackson Heights in March. With each stop, it diminished in size but deepened in charm, so it now more closely resembles the small, half-hidden and often ad-hoc restaurants called wariques in Peru, where the owner, Jimmy Lozano, was born.
Every meal begins with maiz chulpe, toasted dried corn kernels like inverted popcorn, crackly shells with the puff waiting inside. Ceviche might follow, bracing and bright, or rousing leche de tigre, the briny ceviche marinade drunk straight. A few dishes — fried rice shining with sesame oil, and beef still hissing from the wok — honor the legacy of Chinese immigrants to the Americas. All are best chased with chicha morada, a centuries-old brew of purple corn, pineapple peel and thick cinnamon sticks. LIGAYA MISHAN
90-04 37th Avenue (90th Street), Jackson Heights, Queens; 718-440-9949; no website.
At 24, Alexander Yip was the youngest restaurant owner I met this year. His Hong Kong-style rice casserole restaurant, Clay Pot, opened on St. Marks Place in the East Village in early 2018. A second location opened in the West Village about a year later. Mr. Yip’s quick, and early, success might have something to do with growing up in the restaurant business — his father owned Jebon, a pan-Asian fixture on St. Marks Place (just one avenue west of Clay Pot) — that closed in April.
The specialty at Clay Pot is a dish Mr. Yip remembers eating as a child while living in Manhattan’s Chinatown: jasmine rice steamed and served in an earthenware pot, with a customizable medley of toppings rich in salt and fat (to abundantly season the plain rice below). The method was perfected by Mr. Yip’s chef, Julian Yu, and delivers a sizzled shell of crisp, nutty rice at the bottom of the pot, every time. MAHIRA RIVERS
Clay Pot, 58 St. Marks Place (Second Avenue), East Village; 646-434-6449; claypotnyc.com.
Although Millie Peartree was born in the Bronx, her restaurant looks back to the Southern cooking of her mother, Millie Bell of Savannah, Ga. Deliveries of seafood — whiting, catfish, fist-size curls of shrimp — come in daily, to be dredged in cornmeal and strategically deployed seasonings, then fried to order. On the side: French fries wafting Old Bay, cornbread gilded in honey butter, and mac and cheese made in the looser, freer custard style, with a crosshatching of sharp Cheddar, its milder cousin and Monterey Jack, reaching the diner in giddy stages of melt.
The restaurant opened in 2017 as a takeout spot in Fordham Manor, the Bronx, and last March expanded to a larger storefront next door, with proper tables and chairs. Then, just before Thanksgiving, Ms. Peartree suffered a blow: A gas leak in the building forced her to close. While she searches for a new space, she is still taking catering orders. Lucky us. LIGAYA MISHAN
No current address; milliepeartree.com; email millie@milliepeartree.com.
