To love a dish is to love the labor that brought it to your table. It’s to sense the presence of the chef, to read a signature written in flour and butter, salt and smoke — what in Korean is called son-mat, the taste imparted by one person’s hands and no other’s. The best dishes — like these my fellow Hungry City critics, Marian Bull and Mahira Rivers, and I enjoyed this year — aren’t necessarily the most complicated, difficult or inventive. But each is a reminder that someone took the time to cook for us, and made sure to get it right.
Many cultures reserve their most satisfying dishes for breakfast. In Iraq there is makhlama, a folding together of coarsely minced lamb, onions gone translucent and just starting to sweat, and eggs cracked at the last moment, given a moment to set, then pierced so the yolks spill and mingle. LIGAYA MISHAN
7215A Third Avenue (72nd Street), Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; 718-833-3338; no website.
The noodles have no end. Try to disentangle them from the heap on the plate and you keep pulling, until your arm is halfway to the ceiling. A specialty of the Uighurs, a Turkic and Muslim minority in China, they are fantastically chewy and fortifying, under a ladling of beef stew. LIGAYA MISHAN
43-39 Main Street (Elder Avenue), Flushing, Queens; 347-542-3324; nurlan-ny.com.
The sauce here — deep, infernal red and smoky from guajillo chiles — is thick enough that it’s sometimes hard to tell where it ends and the tender strips of pork begin. The color infiltrates the masa around it, with blooms of red visible even when the tamal is still wrapped up, a hint of what’s to come. MARIAN BULL
1316 Oak Point Avenue (Bryant Avenue), Hunts Point, the Bronx; 718-991-1606; citytamale.com.
Chicken wings are cloaked in zingy peri peri sauce, made of South African-cultivated chiles blended with lemon juice and spices, for hours before they are flame-grilled. The wings are blackened on the outside but juicy everywhere else, and abound with delightful pockets of stinging spice. MAHIRA RIVERS
235 Malcolm X Boulevard (Hancock Street), Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; 917-966-8614; no website.
There is a wondrous genre of Thai dishes that, because of the limits of English, we classify as salads — including this happy exercise in deconstruction, in which crispy deep-fried rice balls are crumbled with scraps of thrillingly sour fermented sausage and herbs upon herbs to chase the salt. LIGAYA MISHAN
416 Church Avenue (East Fourth Street), Kensington, Brooklyn; 347-533-9368; thaifarmkitchen.com.
This is how a heart yields: sliced thin, pierced on a skewer and anointed with olive oil and its own raving juices as it languishes on the grill. An Andean snack, the beef heart is anchored on the plate by a plain boiled potato, and dappled in a sauce of ground peanuts and bright-hot ají amarillo. LIGAYA MISHAN
67-03 Woodside Avenue (67th Street), Woodside, Queens; 718-685-2087; bolivianrestaurantpuertadelsol.business.site.
This meat pie is a celebration dish, the sort of thing made in Tibetan homes when the whole family is together. It arrives with its top shorn off, revealing ground beef glistening in a stock of its own making, shot through with Chinese chives and dried coriander. MARIAN BULL
75-15 Roosevelt Avenue (76th Street), Jackson Heights, Queens; 347-507-0216; no website.
Turkish pide is often likened to Italian pizza, but it’s closer in spirit to the bounty of Georgian khachapuri: flatbread curved like a boat, its thick, fluffy borders holding in a meltdown of fresh kashar (a Turkish cheese) and a liberal tumble of sucuk (fermented beef sausage with a flicker of heat). LIGAYA MISHAN
45-08 46th Street (Queens Boulevard), Sunnyside, Queens; 917-396-4777; no website.
It’s easy to love the Portuguese egg tarts, pastéis de nata, at this petite cafe on the Lower East Side. The crackle of a buttery laminated shell filled with wobbly vanilla-spiked custard is elemental in its pleasure. MAHIRA RIVERS
129 Allen Street (Rivington Street), Lower East Side; 212-951-1189; joeybatscafe.com.
Coconut milk and flour make a rich batter for this translucent pan-fried cake, a street snack beloved in Southeast Asia and made here in the Malaysian Nyonya style. Crisp at the edges and tender within, it comes folded around shattered peanuts limned in sugar and knobs of butter that soak into the dough. LIGAYA MISHAN
64A Bayard Street (Elizabeth Street), Chinatown; 646-649-4921; no website.
