Illustration: Naomi Otsu
Welcome to Grub Street’s rundown of restaurant recommendations that aims to answer the endlessly recurring question: Where should we go? These are the spots that our food team thinks everyone should visit, for any reason (a new chef, the arrival of an exciting dish, or maybe there’s an opening that’s flown too far under the radar). This month: an uptown fonda, a downtown tavern, and a midtown-adjacent clubhouse from the Contra guys.
Cocina Consuelo (Hamilton Heights)
Cocina Consuelo feels like a fonda, those homey Mexico City lunch counters, and it has a friendliness that can’t be manufactured. When chef-owner Karina Garcia arrived one morning last week, she cheerfully greeted her customers — “Hi!” “Good morning, what’s up?” — like they’d been coming since they were kids. The restaurant started as a pandemic pop-up, and it’s decorated as exuberantly as the apartment where Garcia and her husband Lalo Rodriguez first hosted those meals. During dinner, they serve mole negro and tortitas de calabaza; during the daytime hours it’s tortillas with a fried egg and salsa roja; sturdy little picaditas piled high with big crumbles of queso fresco, crema, and chorizo verde with enough cilantro to count as your daily greens; a masa pancake that’s thicker than an entire stack of diner flapjacks. Capped with fruit compote (recently blackberry, now apple), it’s served, like the version that went viral for Golden Diner, in a pool of amber honey butter. With a mug of café de olla, it’s good enough to make new memories. —Chris Crowley
The Corner Store (Soho)
If there’s a spectrum of TikTok-famous restaurants between Bernie’s and Bad Roman, the Corner Store, situated appropriately enough on the corner of West Broadway and Houston, sits right in the middle. In the old Dos Casinos space, the team behind Catch has already successfully courted the extremely online crowd, with reservations fully booked within two weeks of opening. The post-COVID elevated bar-and-grill trend is alive and well here, with appetizers like a spinach-artichoke dip and “five-cheese pizza rolls” that are definitely meant to capture the attention of your camera app. The $12 fries are as good as the attentive waiters say, and some revisionist classics, like a Caesar salad with everything-bagel croutons, are good enough to enjoy even if you live a life blissfully unaware of algorithmic feeds. The sour-cream-and-onion martini is, I promise, delightful, smooth and served on a literal silver platter with a couple chips on the side. —Zach Schiffman
Lai Rai (Lower East Side)
Even winos like me agree, New York needed another wine bar like a hole in the head. So why recommend this particular wine bar? Because the narrow Lower East Side space, spilling merrily out onto the sideway, skips the usual dutiful olives-and-Parm-chunks playbook for something more interesting on the food front. How many wine bars do you know that make their own headcheese in the back, musky and zippy with Vietnamese peppercorn? Or fry up their own chicharrones? Lai Rai is a collaboration between two of New York’s better Vietnamese restaurants, Di an Di in Greenpoint and Mắm nearby. Though Lai Rai’s menu is short, I found its snacks tastier and more satisfying than a good number of full meals I’ve had lately.
—Matthew Schneier
Brass (Nomad)
Cooler weather calls for capital-R Restaurants: white tablecloths, plush booths, way too much glassware. The arrival of this new spot from Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra could not be better timed. It’s tucked into the back of the Evelyn Hotel — you may remember its previous life as Benno — and the menu is dialed in to the kind of refined Euro-American chophouse cooking that just makes sense in this kind of room: a golden puck of crab cake with a puddle of mustard sauce, soft ricotta gnudi buried under Parmesan cream and mushrooms, planks of pork shoulder “à la moutarde.” There are enough playful touches — gougères served as a pull-apart ring, firm vanilla custard topped with cartoon-size drips of Creamsicle-orange passion-fruit sauce — to remind you that this duo helped define the downtown wine-bar genre with Wildair; now they’re making power dining a bit more fun, too. —Alan Sytsma
Nomad Tea Parlour (Nomad)
Just around the corner from Brass, Nomad Tea Parlour has been slinging perfect shrimp har gow and scallion pancakes since it opened this summer. But I’ve been waiting for a cool night to return for one very specific reason: Grandma’s beef noodle soup. Unlike some of the updated Cantonese classics on the menu, this soup has not been tampered; the main attraction is the broth, a dark umber infusion — the result of 16 hours spent simmering — with star anise, ginger, and cinnamon, flavors that perfume chunks of beef shank cooked until gelatinous and nearly falling apart. The shank surrounds a mound of bouncy wheat noodles while the bowl is slicked with a bit of spicy red oil beneath a pile of fresh cilantro leaves and crunchy stems. The multilevel room feels cinematic, and this could be a great place for a date or group dim sum, but the long bar up front makes it easy enough to drop in for a drink and an order of lobster egg rolls before tucking into that soup. —Tammie Teclemariam
