Chefs seem more willing to risk expressing their honest selves on the plate — that, or they can’t be bothered any longer with the limitations of public assumptions and definitions around the food they cook. There’s the food itself, none of it strictly traditional, but much of it making reference to classic or even historic Korean techniques and flavors. The 13 Hottest Restaurants in Orlando Right Now, Winter 2020 The best new eats in “The City Beautiful” by Faiyaz Kara Updated Nov 30, 2020, 9:30am EST The instantly cult-status spot for carne asada and adobada, a regional interpretation of al pastor, emerged in 2018 as a firebrand capable of uniting street, food, and club culture with late-night stands that shuffled between Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Koreatown. For years, they’ve been planning a second place to present both the foods of their heritage (Menashe grew up in Israel, with Turkish and Moroccan ancestry, and Gergis’s family has Egyptian origins) and the roots they’ve put down in Southern California. For this month’s refresh, a few Philly restaurants are leaving the list — Curiosity Doughnuts, Huda, and Pivot Coffee and Soupery — to make room for the newer places opening and popping up all around us. What: The taco stand that took LA by storm, combining Tijuana-style carne asada and more than a touch of LA branding and bravado. Bavel, Los Angeles | Bywater American Bistro, New Orleans | Canard, Portland | Carnitas Lonja, San Antonio | Cote, New York | Dialogue, Los Angeles | Elda, Biddeford, ME | Frenchette, New … Momofuku’s chef-auteur relocated to Los Angeles for his first West Coast project; the cooking is his communion with the region. He slow-cooks them for hours until the ropy, near-greaseless hunks of pork reveal a gamut of textures in every bite: crisp, supple, lacy, chewy. When a new restaurant like the Baker’s Table hits both marks, it has the makings of an essential. His showstopper is a large-format, two-course duck presentation perfumed with Middle Eastern flavors, including a cast-iron pot domed with pita dough and filled with duck-beef meatballs in a fragrant chickpea stew. It melds into an oceanic cloud, which Yun returns to earth with a final dousing of coconut milk. Even with the most surreal-looking of desserts from chef de cuisine Max Boonthanakit (another Eater Young Gun, from the class of 2019), the palate stays relatable, like coconut and lime, cherries and cola, or guava and cream cheese. What: An energetic yet personal Malaysian all-day cafe that’s an antidote to the boring, scalable restaurants proliferating across New York (and other high-cost cities). Several dishes still exalt in Caribbean flavors — a lush distillation of tomato, coconut milk, and spices ignites her rabbit curry — but the kitchen also embarks on a survey of the cultures that comprise this singular city. That she and Tsai can make it work with no dish topping $16 is a welcome revelation. What: A BYOB dinner spot in Philly that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Rhodes delivers monologues between courses on weighty topics ranging from mass incarceration to the Great Migration, but even without them, Indigo’s very existence is part of the work: a fine dining restaurant in a historically underserved neighborhood, serving food that unabashedly claims its purpose. Go forth, and break the dinner rut at one of these 20 exciting new Houston restaurants. Shouldn’t customers always be treated this graciously? Why: What makes a restaurant a tourist magnet and what makes it a standby? Locals are protective of this traditionally progressive and diverse neighborhood. A bombastically colorful banana blossom salad includes fried shallots, peanuts, and sliced watermelon radish for echoes and echoes of crunch; she rejiggers Hanoi’s famous dill-scented grilled fish dish, chả cá lã vọng, by adding rice noodles and her punchy riff on Vietnamese pineapple-shrimp sauce. NOTE: A number of New Orleans restaurants have resumed dine-in service. It replaces NoMad Bar, which … Know of something new and exciting that should be on our radar? | MarrowDetroit.com. The best bakeries in London for takeaway pastries and bread. What: A bustling enoteca in South Boston that draws inspiration from Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. I apparently wasn’t the only one; the line that night stretched across half a block. By the time the final savory course — a colossal halibut collar with a soft pillow of Parker House rolls — arrives, sustainability doesn’t just sound like a worthwhile compromise. It reveals Williams’s layered approach to cooking, which combines culinary inspiration from the South, Chicago, his fine dining background, his family history, and the world. Now that the COVID-19 situation in Dallas-Fort Worth is starting to normalize and vaccine accessibility increases, more and more people are returning to the city’s restaurants. 8. Gong, who worked for years at Sake Cafe, delivers raw and nearly raw fish paired with the likes of cucumber and yuzu vinegar and pink dragon fruit, as well as Shanghai comfort food like dumplings, … This all tastes way more of restrained balance than seems possible. Instead of buying an electric tigelle maker, Akunowicz makes seven at a time on a tigelle iron she brought back from Italy a decade ago. Grab a seat along the small counter or, like most customers, head outside to a shaded picnic table. Since a trip to the islands is definitely inadvisable right now, the next best thing is Greenville Avenue’s brand new tiki bar. With two weeks of 100 reservations per night booked even before the restaurant officially opened, it’s safe to say that San Diegans are curious about the latest restaurant from celebrity chef and ‘Top Chef’ veteran Richard Blais. Even when every seat is filled with a hip, age-spanning crowd, the space itself remains a pretense-free zone. Here are 14 of the best this month. In different hands, this could seem a bit overwrought, a presumption that the dining experience was special enough to merit a keepsake. For her pasta menu, Akunowicz roams further afield, offering a beautifully light tagliatelle Bolognese and an earthy parsnip tortelli — a pasta shape common in Emilia-Romagna — with Gorgonzola cheese, which originates just northwest of the region in Milan. As the pandemic makes carryout-friendly restaurants more feasible, Taqueria Chingón represents the most notable new taco spot. Paredes is master of carnitas. At Pacific Standard Time, his proven repertoire merges with a West Coast ethos, so that coils of chitarra snarl Dungeness crab and a salad starring milky stracciatella comes paired with Harry’s Berries strawberries, some of the finest fruit grown in California. She starts by grinding buckwheat (usually grown locally) to make the flour for the noodles over which she labors daily. Here, Eater New Orleans shines the spotlight on the best new restaurants to check out in New Orleans this month, arranged geographically as always. 1302 Nance Street, Houston, TX, (832) 830-8592, trexhouston.com, Muddling the distinction between restaurant and bar isn’t a novel concept these days. Why: There are thousands of taco stands in Los Angeles, but there is only one Tacos 1986. | VirtueRestaurant.com, The freshest news from the food world every day, more meaningfully than most Western tasting menus. Welcome back to an all-new version the Eater Twin Cities Heatmap, a collection of exciting new restaurants to have opened despite a pandemic raging on. A dish of chopped-up local horse clam is fresh and sweet; the clam is abundant, but there is no commercial market for it, so the restaurant harvests its portion itself. Why: When a devilishly clever rendition of kids’ menu buttered noodles hits the table at a buzzy new restaurant, it’s clear that at least one hot spot has an allergy to pretension. 3340 East 12th Street, Oakland, CA, (510) 500-3338, nyumbai.com, Masa — made from corn purchased from local farmers who grow heirloom strains, and then ground and nixtamalized onsite — is the mortar on which Suerte is built. But partners David Barzelay, chef-owner of the supper club-style phenom Lazy Bear, and bar director Nicolas Torres propel these notions to higher national standards with their new joint project. Xochi is one of the country’s best new restaurants, and Houston agrees Bill Addison/Eater. 15 Wonderful Places to Eat in West Seattle. On the speakers, Bob Marley covers play to the crowd, some in fatigues, maybe on a break from Joint Base San Antonio or Camp Bullis, digging into braised oxtails or mac and cheese as fans blow toward the patio.