The kitchen gets the food out fast, which is why the restaurant can feed 800 on a weekend night. Who wouldn't gawk at the sight of so many people eating so much food, trying to shout above the fray? Read more.
Try the crunchy fried fish with homegrown turmeric, mango salad lightened with coconut water or soft-shell crab with the legendarily stinky sataw bean. Read more.
A restaurant that makes beef-heart tartare seem not only possible but desirable; that makes a craveable specialty of pork boiled with cabbage. Read more.
Michael Voltaggio agonizes over every gram of sea-bean chimichurri on the beef tartare, every plate of potato charcoal with crème fraîche and every scoop of wood-smoke ice cream that leaves the line. Read more.
John Shook and Vinny Dotolo have a pretty good sense of what tastes good, be it melted cheese with chorizo or calves' brains with the French curry vadouvan Read more.
Go for the Bäco, Josef Centeno's signature creation, a kind of flatbread sandwich halfway between a Catalan coca and a taco pumped up on 'roids, slicked with a goopy, vaguely Mediterranean sauce. Read more.
Head to a deserted parking lot late at night and wait for the appearance of the Kogi truck, from which you will soon purchase enormous, great-tasting plates of Korean short-rib tacos. Read more.
Cooks County is a restaurant you could visit three times a week and then come back for oxtail hash and cheese biscuits at Sunday brunch. Read more.
If you dare, try the tacos with chiles torreados, ultrahot chiles grown in Armando De La Torre's backyard, sautéed until they practically melt from the heat, served in a fresh tortilla. Read more.
The South filtered through the not-South: fried chicken skin served with hand-made Tabasco, a hot biscuit with a spoonful of pimento cheese or a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas. Read more.
The most popular dish? Definitely the fried chicken sandwich, with coleslaw and what must be the only aioli on the planet spiked with Rooster hot sauce. Read more.
Try the seaweed-tofu beignets, spare arrangements of foraged greens, scallops with nightshade berries or shriveled, butter-soaked carrots that somehow manage to taste better than meat. Read more.
