The 15 Best New Restaurants In NYC 2022

For many years, Rockefeller Center lured in tourists with megabrands like Lego, Tiffany, Kate Spade, and Michael Kors. But in post-COVID New York, the iconic complex has pivoted to embracing more independent — dare we say hipper — brands as a way to attract more native New Yorkers.

Opened by two chefs from the highly-acclaimed Frenchette in Tribeca, Le Rock is a prime example of this new-look Rockefeller Center. Like its surroundings, Le Rock is making old new again by focusing on classic French bistro cuisine. The notion of fine dining has been in such decline that many new French restaurants feel the need to position themselves in post-modern or ironic ways. Le Rock doesn't do this. It unapologetically goes hard at all things French brasserie. In an era when pop food culture is filled with people mashing up well-known dishes, it's kind of refreshing. "I guess I want to get away from 'this is our spin,' or 'take,' or 'twist' on a dish," co-owner Riad Nasr told Resy.

And so it makes sense that almost all of the menu is written in French. Expect classics like escargot bourguignons, poulet rotie espelette, and other dishes you probably haven't heard mentioned since Julia Child graced American airwaves. But is Le Rock too fancy, too French to succeed around the corner from The Lego Store? Nasr doesn't believe so. "(Guests are) the ones that are pushing the industry, and pushing chefs to be more inventive," he told Resy. "So let's give them a lot more credit, rather than dumb things down."

After walking into Lord's in NoHo on a typical night, you're being enveloped by fussed-over English décor, tucking into decadent Oysters Kilpatrick, and swooning to the sounds of Ray Charles. Partners Patricia Howard and Ed Symanski have a head-turning hit with Lord's, but today's brilliant success is a long way from the dark nadir of their pandemic.

In early 2020, Howard and Symanski were courting investors for an upscale, meat-focused English dining concept called Dame when COVID-19 struck an existential blow to the very idea of dining out. Like a football club dropping out of the English Premier League, the partners' visions of grandeur were suddenly relegated to pipe dreams. But they found renewed inspiration when the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in the summer of 2020: Dame was relaunched as a seafood pop-up that sent proceeds to the movement. Good intentions aside, the pop-up became a bona fide hit for its fish and chips, culminating in a profile in The New Yorker. In June 2021, Dame opened as a brick-and-mortar restaurant that continued to build on the success of the pop-up.

Lord's is based on that initial vision for Dame. Steeped in English culinary tradition, the London-born Symanski celebrates entire animals with nose-to-tail butchery and cooking. But the menu is also informed by Dame's transition. In a culmination of the partners' journey, dishes like hay-smoked trout and poached skate feature prominently. "It's so weird to me that we've become known for seafood cooking," Symanski told Eater.

Specializing in Jerusalem-via-Philly café fare, K'Far is a premier example of a curious 21st-century phenomenon — the hotel restaurant that's a destination for locals. Walk into the all-day café at The Hoxton Hotel in Williamsburg, and you're just as likely to see tourists as you are to see people from the surrounding neighborhood. It's a testament to the café's name, which means "village" in Hebrew.

When it comes to the lunch and dinner menus at K'Far, pastry chef Katreena Kanney is the star of the show. Try reading the following menu items without involuntarily salivating: pistachio sticky buns, apple babkas, and Tunisian salads with seared tuna, preserved lemon, olives, and harissa. After lunch, K'Far gets livelier. Lights are dimmed. Music turns up. Pricier dinner menus get rolled out. Servers clad in black briskly walk from table to table (via Brooklyn Magazine). It's a necessary and welcome reminder that every village needs to let loose after the day's work is done.

Conceived in coal and gestated in natural gas, New York-style pizza was born out of the fiery hot furnaces of the 19th and 20th centuries. But like Bob Dylan before him, pizzaiolo Adam Baumgart has gone electric at his Fort Greene pizzeria Oma Grassa.

The electric pizza ovens at Oma Grassa are set to 650 degrees F — a cooking temperature that splits the difference between that of a gas-fired pizza oven and a coal-fired oven (via Eater). The hot stone floor of these ovens makes for a pie that is much crispier than a New York-style pizza. This structure allows these pizzas to stand up better to generous amounts of toppings, and Baumgart isn't shy when it comes to decorating his pies with ingredients like fennel sausage, pickled chilies, pepperoni, and mushrooms. One menu highlight is a tomato pie topped with anchovies, capers, olives, and a few whiskers of pecorino cheese.

Baumgart told Brooklyn Magazine that he partly has the pandemic to thank for the opening of Oma Grassa, particularly Governor Cuomo's much-derided food mandate. "During the early pandemic, I started a pizza pop-up in my friend's bar, Botanica, on Houston Street. Because of Cuomo's mandate, he needed food in the bar ... we bought a nice oven, put it in the basement, and got this whole thing started."

On the outside, Queens Lanka looks like one of New York city's countless corner delis, but inside chef and co-owner Rasika Wetthasinghe flexes classical training and a Sri Lankan heritage to create a menu of dazzling Sri Lankan dishes. For example, a humbly-described dish of "rice and curry" at Queens Lanka might contain four kinds of curry, beetroot batons, deep-fried sprats, and a traditional relish called gotu kola sambol. Another menu highlight, lamprais, is a rice dish wrapped in a banana leaf and prepared with curried cashews, pickled fried eggplant, and curried mackerel-potato fritter.

Like the deceptively humble storefront, the story behind Queens Lanka goes much deeper than a formally trained chef serving up highly-complex Sri Lankan classics. Wetthasinghe and his co-owner Suchira Wijayarathne both have wives and children back in their native Sri Lanka (via The New Yorker). The high-profile success of Queens Lanka would suggest that the co-owners are better able to financially support their families, who are living in a country recently rocked by political strife and facing seismic uncertainty.

We like to think of ethnic neighborhoods like New York City's Chinatown as everlasting. But there was a time when Chinatown wasn't Chinatown. And there will be a time when the neighborhood is as Chinese as any other in the city. Thanks to gentrification and generational shifts, the Chinese families that made Chinatown what it is are increasingly moving away. A message on the theater-like marquee in Chinatown's new Potluck Club acknowledges this inherently transient nature of the surrounding neighborhood: Here for a good time, not a long time.

Potluck Club is essentially a love letter to Chinatown, the Cantonese American culture that gave the neighborhood its identity, and a broader sense of New York's Asian cultures. Speaking with Resy about the inspiration behind Potluck Club, co-owner Cory Ng said his Asian American ownership group "grew up here, and not in Asia ... (W)e wanted our restaurant to reflect this: heavily Asian rooted, but not just within the confines of being Chinese."

Some dishes at Potluck Club are what you might expect: modern reboots of American Chinese classics like salt-and-pepper chicken with Southern-style scallion biscuits. But some dishes are more modern and chef-driven. An endive salad is made with dragonfruit, cara cara organs, pistachios, and pecorino cheese. A tiger shrimp main dish is prepared with Calabrian chili aioli, hot honey, candied walnuts, and a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid called caulilini. It all sounds like a good time, as promised.

When Andre Hueston Mack — owner of the new Kingfisher seafood restaurant in Prospect Lefferts Gardens — moved to New York City in 2004, he had a moment you might call seeing the forest through the trees: "(W)hen you think of New York, you don't really think about seafood," he told Patch. "I mean, we're surrounded by water."

Maybe it took an outsider to see this particular gap in New York's culinary landscape. Mack is a Texas native and a sommelier by trade, with stints at both The French Laundry and Per Se. In January 2020, he took his first step into restaurant ownership with &Sons Ham Bar. Despite the bar opening on the doorstep of a global pandemic, it has thrived and Mack opened three more businesses — a provisions shop, bakery, and a taqueria — before opening Kingfisher.

Like any good restauranteur, Mack has good people in place, and for Kingfisher's menu, he's let his hospitality group's culinary director, Nico Bouter, off the leash. The Dutch chef's tour de force features locally-caught sustainable fish in both cooked and raw preparations.

New York's food scene is celebrated just as much for its high-end romance as its low-down trysts. Serving Laos-inspired cocktails and bar snacks, Dhom is definitely in the latter category. Even though everything on the food menu costs less than $20, it's full of tasty, aromatic thrills. The main attractions are three kinds of meat skewers hanger steak, chicken, and duck heart. There are also salads, crisp spring rolls, and crunchy coconut rice. At the bar, standard-priced drinks include classic cocktails, signature cocktails, beer, wine, and sake. There are also more than a dozen non-alcoholic beverage options.

Dhom is the second restaurant for co-owner and Kansas native Soulayphet Schwader. He told Thrillist that Dhom was inspired by his first months in New York City, when he wanted to explore the culinary landscape, but could barely afford to do it on a line cook's wages: "It's dedicated to those in the East Village crowd who remind me of when I first moved to New York City: poor, young, and looking for different things to try."