What began as a pandemic supper club from the apartment of Karina Garcia and her husband, Lalo Rodriguez, is now an all-day cafe in Harlem. It is a casual space that still feels like an extension of their home right down to the piano. The breakfast here is outstanding, from the masa pancakes to its tortilla with fried eggs and hoja santa.

Leave it to Frenchette to make one of uptown’s most storied bistros hot again. The $125 prix fixe includes generous portions of an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert, plus a salad. The French icon, open since 1937, feels anything but stuffy, in a room with red gingham tablecloths.

Din Tai Fung, the Taiwanese soup dumpling chain with locations across the world, debuted its first East Coast location — with impatient fans eager to visit. The sunken space, in the former Mars 2112 building, can feel like a Vegas restaurant, with several checkpoints. Once at seated, the real theater awaits. Order the xiao long bao its known for, but the real can’t-miss items are the pork chops over fried rice and the dumplings in chile oil. Leave room for desserts like the chocolate xiao long bao (or the less gimmicky version with black sesame).

Brass is the latest project of Wildair and Contra veterans Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra inside the Evelyn Hotel, where they also oversee the Tusk Bar’s food. Decorated with colorful murals and a grand piano anchoring the room, Brass begins with appetizers like a chopped heirloom tomato salad stippled with hearts of palm. A moules frites dish arrives on chickpea panisse. Main courses run from tilefish in saffron sauce to pork shoulder a la moutarde. They also offer miniature cocktails for those who want to sip without a buzz (at half the price of a $24 cocktail).

Borgo is Andrew Tarlow’s Manhattan project; it’s his first restaurant across the bridge from the Brooklyn restaurant empire he built at Diner, Roman’s, Achilles Heel, et al. The room is a stunner, the service is reliably excellent, and dishes — like the must-order timballo — can be decidedly delicious.

In its first couple months, Taylor Swift had already been twice to the Corner Store, the new restaurant from the team behind clubby Catch. And while it pains us to say it, the Corner Store is more than just a celebrity magnet that’s become impossible to get into as a walk-in and has a dress code. Because, yeah, if you can look past the fact that the menu feels almost AI-generated for what’s on trend at the moment, the food is honestly fun and pretty good (pizza rolls, a French dip, a stuffed lobster).

The colorful interiors seem primed for flash photos, making the menu more daring than it needed to be. Here, organ meats and dry-aged fish are two of the lures at this sleek Soho newcomer from restaurateur Ariel Arce and chef Aaron Lirette. Spaghetti comes with blood sausage, and beef tongue is also a Heroes menu feature. Cocktails also take their chances, using memorable ingredients like spiced plum and charred corn, exclusive to Heroes. Upstairs, Pearl Box, sibling cocktail bar with its own interior design scape, is ready for a date.

Taqueria Ramirez is a hit in Greenpoint, so now the team is replicating its success across the bridge in the East Village. This new taqueria sells carnitas tacos made with different parts of the pig. There is trompa (snout), which is rich in collagen, and chamorro (flank), which has crunchy, fried skin. In total, there are around a dozen cuts of meat on the menu, including oreja (ear), buche (stomach), and seso (brain).

It’s no surprise that Eel Bar is sexy — that’s because it comes from the team from nearby Cervo’s. Is Eel Bar a bar or a restaurant? It doesn’t matter, either way: It’s a good night out. A tapas menu includes items like potato salad with roe, shrimp gildas, fried mussels, and a plain but delicious dish of meatballs. Seating is in the bar or the dining room, and, charmingly, you can look from one into the other.

Bridges seems the to be the restaurant that has Lower Manhattan in a chokehold. The dining room is just about exactly how we’d want a new restaurant to feel — warm but not overly dressed, where the bar seating is as lively as the white-tableclothed tables in the main dining room. The food is hard to pin down to one cuisine, but clearly pulls emphasis from the owners’ experiences at Estela. (Even where it doesn’t always stick a landing, it’s audacious and technically-impressive.) The comte cheese tart with mushrooms is the dish you’ll hear most about, and yes, you should order it. But the tuna with dates is even more special: an unlikely combo that somehow works.

Pho Ga Vang, a Vietnamese restaurant with locations in Falls Church, Virginia, as well as Philadelphia and Atlanta, is throwing its hat in the New York ring. The chef and owner opened in Chinatown — the same block as Golden Diner and Vietnamese American bakery, Bánh by Lauren. The Virginia location made Washingtonian’s 100 best restaurants for 2024 list. There are several types of pho here, but of course, you can’t go wrong with the namesake, and the spring rolls are some of the best in town.