The foodways of New Mexico are even more regionalized and misconstrued than Texas’s Tex-Mex traditions. In restaurants, New Mexican cuisine boils down to the quality of two dominant chile sauces: the dusky, fruity, slightly spicy red variation, made from dried pods, and the chunkier, vegetal roasted green chile version. There is no better indoctrination into the state’s culinary nucleus than Read more...

Dim sum is among my favorite meals; I took a particularly obsessive deep dive through the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles this past year while researching the Eater Guide to California. A Sunday jaunt to the original Koi Palace (the flagship of its three locations) reminded me why it’s the indispensable cornerstone among the region’s many stellar dim sum Read more...

Georgia, but it wasn’t until he opened his second Seattle restaurant, in the spring of 2017, that he chose to focus professionally on the foods of the South and his African-American heritage. The decision, and the restaurant’s immediate success, has made him one of the nation’s towering figures of Southern cooking. Among the menu’s familiar, gorgeously rendered comforts, the truest Read more...

There is no sign outside the self-named restaurant of Jose Enrique Montes Alvarez; there’s also no missing the building, a cottage spangled with Art Deco geometries and painted bright pink. Jose Enrique served as the initial headquarters for José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen, which eventually served over 3 million meals in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria’s destruction in Read more...

Effervescent, always-present owner Kaiser Lashkari and his wife, Azra Babar Lashkari, turn out nearly 100 distinct dishes at their boxy strip-mall restaurant in the city’s Mahatma Gandhi District. Numerous curries, including Hyderabadi chicken hara masala coursing with green chiles, evince several regional Indian cuisines, but it’s key to order the gems inspired by Kaiser Lashkari’s native Pakistan. He excels in Read more...

Jonathan Whitener, the chef who owns HLAY with front-of-house ace Lien Ta, is arguably the country’s most creatively energized practitioner of the “global plates” aesthetic. Salsa negra, smoked beef tongue, nam jim, carrot curry, blood cake, almond dukkah, sprouted broccoli, New Zealand cockles: All have a place on his menu; all make sense in his electric, eclectic compositions; all reflect Los Read more...

Ralph Brennan and his business partner, Terry White, rescued this French Quarter monolith in 2014, shepherding $20 million worth of reconstructive surgery on a building the size of a small cruise ship. Among the city’s Creole restaurant institutions, Brennan’s now takes the lead with its balance of timeless pageantry and relevant, finely honed cooking. Executive chef Slade Rushing nails the Read more...

With an artist’s sense of constant reinvention, Dominique Crenn has been bending flavors and meditating on design since her flagship restaurant’s 2011 debut. More masterfully than ever, Crenn and her team (including pastry chef Juan Contreras) mine the middle ground between intellect and emotion, between heady presentation and flat-out deliciousness. Crenn focuses the modernist kitchen on seafood and vegetables, using Read more...