The 10 Best New Restaurants of 2014

Go to previous slideFor New Yorkers who’ve been eating and drinking at this address since the Montrachet era, Bâtard reads like a new chapter in downtown

Some of Markus Glocker’s most enjoyable food leans toward Austria, where he was raised, like the chicken schnitzel served with what has to be the finest potato salad in the city. It’s a wonderfully sane dish in a restaurant that tries to bring sanity back to high-style dining.

 

  A sit-down branch of the century-old Russ & Daughters appetizing business finally arrived this year, and not a minute too soon. 

 

  Of course, there are the fishes, each more luxuriously oily than the last. 

 

  The Simone’s retro ideas honestly express the sensibilities of the owners, Chip Smith, Tina Vaughn, shown center, and Robert Margolis, who believe the old-fashioned niceties are still relevant. 

 

  While you’re at the Simone you believe it, too. This extends to Mr. Smith’s cooking, which is classically French in technique but which feels timeless and natural in his hands.

 

  Keith McNally says he builds the kind of restaurants where he’d like to eat. Anyone seeing how well Cherche Midi turned out will wonder why all other restaurateurs don’t do the same. 

 

  The menu requires no introductory speechifying, although it helps to be familiar with pre-modern French totems like frogs’ legs in parsley sauce. 

 

  Like Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ivan Ramen is more than a place for noodle soup, though its shio ramen is a dashi-loaded blast of shimmering Jewish-grandmother chicken broth, and the spicy red chili ramen could probably end wars. 

 

  Purists who measure this restaurant against traditional ramen-yas are missing the point: Ivan Ramen is a chef’s restaurant, where Ivan Orkin, a son of Long Island, plays delicious and witty games of his own with Japanese food. 

 

  Drawing on homey mid-Atlantic recipes and the pasta skills she learned in Italian kitchens, Patti Jackson cooks at Delaware & Hudson as if the only point of running a restaurant is to make people happy. 

 

  Her $48 menus are one of the best deals in the city. 

 

  The great achievement of Contra is that it’s both highly ambitious and resolutely accessible. 

 

  The chefs — Jeremiah Stone, center, handles the savory courses while Fabian von Hauske is in charge of desserts and bread — cook expressively, gently, with an eye toward nature and an aversion for easy effects. 

  Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone’s strategy at their latest restaurant is to splatter classic French cooking with non-French spices and flavors, and when it works you get dishes so original and unexpected they almost make you dizzy.

 

  The two chefs seem to question everything when they’re building a new restaurant; with this one, they asked whether antiques like silver punch bowls (for oysters) and carafes (for red wines, even ones that don’t need decanting) could add an edge of celebratory decadence that feels right for these times. The answer is yes. 

 

  Too often, the reward we get for treating our chefs like celebrities is a menu that seems to have been texted from a first-class lounge at the Aspen airport. Bobby Flay didn’t do that with Gato.

  Mr. Flay chases vivid, intense flavors as if they hold the secret of eternal youth. 

 

  The food, nominally Mediterranean but cooked with all-American enthuasiasm, piles up salt, acid, char, smoke and spice. 

  Contemporary Israeli food is the idea at Bar Bolonat. 

 

  The shrimp in a coconut-turmeric curry is Yemenite, and Bar Bolonat is getting better as it goes along.