"Caffè Panna was opened in 2019 by Hallie Meyer as an homage to Italian coffee and gelato. The original location is on Irving Place in Gramercy Park. It offers an array of gelatos, including classic flavors, coffee drinks, and daily new flavors using Greenmarket ingredients. After a pandemic blip, it added hand-packed pints to its offerings. A new outpost in Greenpoint includes an ice-cream factory and seating area. The ice cream is rich and chewy with specific flavors like stracciatella and cookies and cream. The venue offers affogatos and granitas, and the cream is imported from Piedmont and whipped fresh daily. High demand leads to rapid flavor sellouts." - Shauna Lyon

"Before opening Corima, in a moody, rustic space on the bottom edge of the Lower East Side, the chef Fidel Caballero cooked at some of the city’s most enjoyably weird and cerebral restaurants, including a residency at Rhodora and a tenure at (R.I.P., sigh) Contra, the thimble-size, Michelin-starred downtown tasting-menu restaurant that closed late last year after a decade of service. Caballero, who grew up between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, just over the Mexican border, builds his menu on a foundation of northern Mexican ingredients and techniques—green chilis, flour tortillas, plenty of cheese. Corima is named for korima, a principle of communality central to the way of life of the Tarahumara people, who are indigenous to the Mexican state of Chihuahua. But, as you might expect from Caballero’s C.V., he pulls in elements that take the restaurant well beyond any simplistic category of “Mexican food”: a bit of France, a bit of China, a whole heck of a lot of Japan. Even the tortillas get a cheffy spin. Unconventionally, Caballero makes his with butter, rather than animal fat or oil, and adds a bit of sourdough starter for flavor. The tortillas are cooked one at a time over the back of an inverted wok; a kitchen torch is used to char the exposed face to an ideal level of blistery singe. They run nine dollars apiece (why are other tortillas so inexpensive, anyway?) and are served with a smear of softened, cultured butter, colored umber-orange with recado negro, a Yucatec seasoning blend made from charred chilis and spices." - Helen Rosner

"The signature dish here is the cold Himokawa udon. Served in a ceramic ring bowl that echoes in shape an oversized ring light that your fellow diner-cum-microinfluencer might use to document the blow-by-blow of ingestion, the noodles are beguilingly wide Möbius strips of silk: sleek, slippery, and impervious to even the most patient engagement with chopsticks." - Jiayang Fan

"Take, for example, the kaleidoscopic riot of flavors in the Buss Up Shut Roti Plate at HAAM, a Caribbean restaurant that opened in Williamsburg last fall. A paratha roti, pliant and chewy—the so-called busted-up shirt that gives this iconic Trinidadian dish its name—is piled on a large dish, surrounded by a big, vivid-orange swipe of earthy-sweet mashed pumpkin; a scoop of tender stewed greens; and a dollop of curry mango that’s sharp and deep and hot enough to make every neuron in your brain fire at once. HAAM, it turns out, is an acronym for “healthy as a motha,” but there’s nothing dutiful or diminished about the dish. It elicits pure sensory happiness." - Helen Rosner

"Another of a recent spate of Mexican seafood-and-cocktail spots, serves crudos and aguachiles along with snacks such as a lovely crisp-fried-cod tostada, in a sexy underground-clublike atmosphere." - Shauna Lyon

"Specializing in exceptional traditional Mexican food in Long Island City since 2012." - Shauna Lyon

"A tiny walk-in-only restaurant in the West Village, where the chef Cosme Aguilar is serving exquisite Mexican seafood dishes, potent cocktails, and upscale chill vibes: a vacation in one sitting." - Shauna Lyon

"Café Carmellini is a serious, sophisticated restaurant, with white linens on the tables and bow-tied service captains. The exquisitely appointed dining room is all blue and gold and rich brown woods, with soaring ceilings, full-sized faux trees, and discreet balcony-level box seating. The menu is not quite French, though it features French quantities of butter; it’s not quite Italian, though there is something undeniably Italian about the ecstatic approach Carmellini takes to vegetables. Scallops Cardoz, an homage to the late Indian American chef Floyd Cardoz, features the delicate shellfish bathed in a richly layered masala sauce, alongside basmati rice cooked with cardamom and viridian makrut lime leaves. Dinner at Café Carmellini is rich, no matter how many foam garnishes or how ascetic your ordering style." - Helen Rosner

"So I feel a bit like Goldilocks at Robbins’s newest spot, Misipasta, which opened last summer, again in Williamsburg, on the ground floor of a charming brick row house on an especially charming stretch of Grand Street. It’s a market as much as a restaurant, and the narrow room is mostly given over to operational space." - Helen Rosner

"If you can’t get into Lilia, you might end up at Misi, Robbins’s lower-key spot on the other end of Williamsburg. When I close my eyes at Misi, I have a great time; the pastas are terrific, and the vegetable dishes are zingy and bright. But I’ve always struggled with the room, which is glass-walled and ceramic-floored." - Helen Rosner