The restaurant world has its own set of untouchables—figures whose legacies are so large that we jokingly refer to them as the Illuminati. But 2016 threatened the idea that these chefs, despite their wild success, can soar into the sunset unscathed. Thomas Keller’s invincibility shield was rendered useless as Per Se’s stars vanished. David Chang’s midas touch was questioned as Nishi drew mixed reviews. There are moments when the Food Gods may fumble, and appear to us mortal. Even so, it would be foolish to let temporary missteps from the Establishment blind us to the strong crop of newcomers in New York.

After all, there was a lot to celebrate. French food continued its triumphant return in 2016, and while the competition was fierce, it was one Parisian import’s flawless execution of rotisserie chicken that made us feel like we wandering the streets of Montmartre once again. A new player in Chelsea Market cemented the food hall's status for destination Mexican food, this time focusing on the seaside traditions of Baja. A talented chef without a home made a comeback at his new Indian restaurant Paowalla, where he introduced us to the joys Goan breads and snacks. And just when you thought you had seen every variety of ramen, the arrival of a new Japanese import redefined the slurping experience with its startling isolation booths. 

To tie all these loose ends together, we present to you New York’s best new restaurants of 2016.

Written by Justin Bolois (@justinbolois), Chris Schonberger (@cschonberger), Regan Hofmann (@regan_hofmann), Foster Kamer (@weareyourfek), and Jamie Feldmar (@jfeldmar). 

Neighborhood: Chelsea
Address and phone: 409 W 15th St (212-920-4986)
Website: losmariscos1.com

In theory, Chelsea Market is supposed to be a culinary punch line, a manicured warren of vendors that collects tourist runoff from the High Line. Instead, it has inspired owner Christian Pineda to re-live his memories of growing up in Mexico. He made this clear with his first venture, Los Tacos No. 1, focusing on char-grilled asada and al pastor sliced off the trompo. This time, he looks to the sea with Los Mariscos, where the hallmarks of great coastal Mexican fare—salty, crunchy, creamy, and always hit with a burst of acidity—are fine-tuned in a white-tiled setting reminiscent of a seaside Baja stall. Pineda’s same philosophy of restraint applies here: Don’t gussy up the source material. This means nailing the essentials like battered fish tacos, slipped inside homemade tortillas; chopped octopus, fish, shrimp, and scallop ceviche smeared lightly with mayo, brightened with cucumber and onion, and finished with a crown of avocado slices; and vibrant bowls of shrimp drowned in a chile broth. If you’re still skeptical of Chelsea Market with that michelada in your hand, the joke’s on you.—Justin Bolois

Order this: Fish taco, all ceviches, shrimp aguachile (green), clams estilo ensenada, michelada

Neighborhood: Nolita
Address and phone: 203 Mott St (646-850-9480)
Website: mrdonahues.com

At this point, the teeny-tiny size of Mr. Donahue's is only worth mentioning for one reason: It's perfectly period-appropriate, on a level that theme restaurants almost never achieve. The turn-of-the-century sense of scale inside the miniature storefront on Mott Street—with settings, doorways, and plateware just a hair smaller than feels natural to us now—is like seeing George Washington's bed. Were people really once that short? Did restaurants really feel that modest? But Mr. Donahue's is not like walking into a self-consciously art-directed "experience." The menu is substantively modern, with ingredients like bottarga and a spicy avocado sauce that tastes like it gets escorted over from its ambitious Thai neighbor, Uncle Boons, every evening. The rotisserie chicken drumstick comes frilled with a paper crown, but underneath it is a straightforwardly delicious piece of fowl. The same goes for the crab imperial, served in a twee tin shell but accompanied by cellophane-wrapped saltines straight from the diner down the street. The overall effect is just a slight perspective tilt, enough to disorient the hardened NYC cynic into having a genuine reaction. Probably one of delight.—Regan Hofmann

Order this: Chicken-fried pork cheek, roast beef, rotisserie chicken with avocado sauce, crab imperial, pickled beets

Neighborhood: Flatiron
Address and phone: 30 E 20th St (212-267-7426)
Website: lecoqriconyc.com

The slogan emblazoned across Le Coq Rico's entrance—"a bistro of beautiful birds"—is definitely the year's most appealingly outlandish tagline for a restaurant. Turns out, it also accurately describes the year's most refreshingly simple dining concept: a fever dream of fowl enthusiasm where your choice of ultra-luxe poultry—identified by terroir and age—is trussed, poached in jus, spun on the Cadillac of rotisseries, and eventually presented whole at your table with all the ceremony befitting of its noble origins. While the roasted chickens are reason enough to visit,  chef Antoine Westermann's Parisian import doesn't stop there—eggs slow-cooked with chanterelles, funky presentations of heart and liver, and an explosion of feathers hanging from the walls and ceilings exemplify the refined brand of mania that makes the place tick. Share the Brune Landaise, but steal the squab en croute for yourself—the deeply flavored breasts, enriched with foie gras and squab liver, then baked in flaky puff pastry, is our pick for best dish of the year.—Chris Schonberger

Order this: Brune Landaise chicken, squab en croute, seared chicken liver salad, vanilla mille-feuille

Neighborhood: Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Address and phone: 364 Grand St (718-360-4535)
Website: pizzalovesemily.com

It might be absurd that a pizza restaurant's second outpost is making a list like this. But make no mistake—it's not for a lack of great choices in new restaurants, but genuinely speaks to the level of upgrade that Emmy Squared is from Emily. For starters, it's a bigger, bustier space, right in the heart of Williamsburg. But then there's the O.G. Emily's smart sensibilities about ingredient sourcing and ideas about what a perfect crust should be, taken and applied whole-hog to the Detroit-style square pizza—a crisp, crunchy pie, perfectly chewy, absurdly carb-y, dangerously tasty. Throw in a full bar (with rum punch on tap); the face-punch of umami that is E-Squared's Okonomi waffle fries (topped with kewpie and bonito flakes); and one of the best (and most surprising) hot-chicken sandwiches in the city? What you have then isn't so much an upgrade or a new outpost as it is an entirely different restaurant in all but lineage, because the name is just that brilliantly dead-on, too.—Foster Kamer

​Order this: Okonomi fries, Deluxe, Hatchback, Margarita, Emmy emmy, chicken parm, burger

Neighborhood: Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Address and phone: 567 Union Ave (718-576-3095)
Website: lilianewyork.com

It would be no great loss if New York put a moratorium on new Italian restaurants in 2017, having suffered this year's glut of overpriced cacio e pepe and listless octopus starters. The strongest counterpoint to this otherwise superfluous pasta explosion was engineered by the triumphant comeback of  Missy Robbins. Not only did the veteran chef return to NYC armed with her pasta-making superpowers still intact, but she also riddled her menu with appealing insta-classics that pushed beyond lazy homage: orbs of cacio e pepe battered and fried into bite-size frittele; grilled clams kicked up with Calabrian chili; and sheep's-milk cheese agnolotti made exotic with the addition of saffron and honey. The message to next year's crop of pasta pretenders is clear: If you come at the queen, you best not miss.—Chris Schonberger

Order this: Cacio e pepe fritelle, grilled clams, sheeps-milk agnolotti, lamb leg steak
 

Neighborhood: SoHo
Address and phone: 195 Spring St (212-235-1098)
Website: paowalla.com

As much as New Yorkers love the bloodsport of tearing down their idols, they find equal satisfaction in a good comeback story. That drama plays out in Floyd Cardoz’s newest restaurant, where the celebrated Tabla chef and Top Chef Masters contestant once again plumbs the depths of the Indian food vernacular. This time, Cardoz plays the role of paowalla, the Portuguese-Hindi word for bread-maker, manning the tandoor ovens to stuff bacon in naan, or smear chile paste in Tibetan steamed buns known as tingmo. Sharing is encouraged here, which helps unlock the spice algorithms of Cardoz’s Goan past. Shrimp curry pie is comforting and soulful, a pureéd filling fitted in hollowed-out dough that makes you wish it were served whole instead of half. Dogfish wrapped in banana leaf brings the same pleasures of a tamale, infused with the flavor of coconut curry. Cardoz's vivid memories of home is a blessing for diners, but even an Instagrammable dish like brioche toast with chutney, cheese, and a fried egg (Egg Kejriwal) is proof that his concessions to the zeitgeist still hit the mark.—Justin Bolois

Order this: Stuffed breads, egg kejriwal, goan shrimp curry pie, kerala banana leaf dogfish, baby pig vindaloo, upma polenta, tandoori cauliflower  

Neighborhood: Flatiron
Address and phone: 43 W 28th St (646-476-7217)
Website: atoboynyc.com

Those Korean barbecue side-dishes you know as banchan finally get the spotlight you've always wanted them to have at Atoboy, where they're re-framed as tapas. The menu's simple: Pay $36, get three dishes, with reasonable upsells for truffles and other add-ons. But as buttoned-up as the concrete minimalism of Atoboy would lead you to believe it is, this place is all party-in-the-back. There's the beef tartare, plated ice-cold, a perverse KBBQ fantasy of going in on raw meat before it can even hit the grill, because you're just nasty like that; and the placement of a single oyster on top of it all is almost vulgar—wrong in all the right ways. An egg custard with sea urchin and watercress is a beautifully-steamed stage for uni to jiggle upon, and work the pole, as it were, as you beckon your slippery, custardy indulgence onto a chopstick with a finger. It’s the kind of dish you want to slip a $20 before it leaves.—Foster Kamer

​Order this: Octopus, egg with uni, fried chicken, steak tartar, razor clams

Neighborhood: Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Address and phone: 68 Greenpoint Ave, Ste 2 (347-422-0656)
Website: hailmarybk.com

Hail Mary is hedging its bets with its "diner with a twist" positioning, a safety move that's 100% understandable but does the place a major disservice. What husband-and-wife team Ham and Sohla El-Waylly are doing in their first restaurant together is having fun—and yes, that includes making a great burger and soda fountain drinks both soft and boozy. But Ham is a creative beast in the kitchen in his first venture since leaving Empellon, and Sohla is as deft with balancing tricky dessert flavors as she is handy with multicolored sprinkles. The Sasso fried chicken, for example, starts off simply enough. It's crisp and juicy, lots of golden crags hanging off a bird who was clearly taller and less busty than some of his factory friends. But the flavors multiply the longer you focus on them. There's sweet and smoky, and a kind of loamy umami that lingers. There's some chile heat, plus deep salt. Order whatever you see on the menu that doesn't seem to make sense. I promise it makes sense to them, and once you cede control, you'll have a hell of a time.—Regan Hofmann

Order this: Sasso fried chicken, duck with egyptian dirty rice, charred greens salad, deep-fried burrata, any mix-and-match sundae, funfetti cake

Neighborhood: Bushwick, Brooklyn
Address and phone: 374 Johnson Ave (718-381-0491)
Website: ichiran.com

Eating ramen alone in your own private booth, as one does at Ichiran in Japan, encourages deep meditation on the Japanese soup, thanks to a pair of disembodied hands that reaches through a curtain to silently deposit a bowl before you. Located in a giant warehouse space in Bushwick that the Fukuoka-based operation hopes will eventually manufacture noodles for future NYC locations, the Brooklyn Ichiran has many of the same features as its Japanese counterparts: Diners order by filling out a paper ticket, and ramen is served to customers in individual partitions through a curtained window; it is possible to not ever see your waiter. The effect is that you are forced to concentrate on the soup before you, which is worth your undivided attention. In Japan, Ichiran isn’t even close to the gold standard of ramen joints. But in New York, the import appears to have doubled-down on technique and execution, mining pork bones for an ultra-creamy, smooth tonkotsu broth and making its own thin, straight noodles in-house. With no distractions, you'll inhale every last drop.—Jamie Feldmar

Order this: Tonkotsu ramen is really the only option, though you can specify how rich you’d like your broth and how soft you’d like your noodles.  

Neighborhood: Prospect Heights
Address and phone: 659 Vanderbilt Ave (718-522-2610)
Website: olmstednyc.com

You could watch food writers struggle to explain what, exactly, they cook at Olmsted as its gushing reviews started to pour in. There was plenty of "most amazing neighborhood restaurant everrrrr," which: absolutely. You could've read about the beautiful backyard, the reasonable pricing, and the surprise at its mere existence. But at the end of the day, they couldn't pin down what Olmsted cooks, because, well, you can't. This place is squirrely in all the right ways. For example: The restaurant's Instagram star, a "carrot crepe," with littleneck clams and sunflower seeds? French Indochina by way of Napa and, uh, Long Island? It's an absurdist art piece, a conceptualist's recipe. This fall, the cheapest entree was (as whispered by a bartender) also the staff's then-collective favorite: a heirloom tomato schnitzel with ricotta and bagna cauda on the side—highbrow stoner food from the Italian-Austrian border. These are weird, ambitious feats, executed with a laid-back sense of purpose that's also refined—the likes of which we haven't truly seen pulled off in a new way since the heyday of Ssäm Bar. The most accurate way to describe Olmsted is as one of the few new restaurants in America to stick that landing.—Foster Kamer

​Order this: (Menu changes) Carrot crepe, crawfish boil crackers, tempura scallops, roasted hen, lamb porchetta, chawanmushi