The 20 Best Restaurants In New York City, Ranked

Thinking up 20 places you want to eat in New York City is easy. But trying to select a list of restaurants as the best in the city? This is a dilemma that makes you pine for the easy dialectic of Sophie's Choice while we spend a half hour agonizing over Sophie's Cuban. While a single dish can recommend a venue, we want eateries that excel across their menus. Their décor, service, food, and atmosphere all factor into answering our main rule: Would you travel just to be there?

The first test is that there doesn't need to have wait service, but the dining area must include tables that are discrete from any line to order. Sorry, this is unfair to White Bear, as well as many of New York's favorite pizza places. (Don't worry, the upscale pizza restaurants are still covered.) Second, you have to be able to actually eat there. While we're not cutting out the tough reservations, we can't recommend Rao's for the ten people who might slip in — even though the meatballs and salad, yes, really are that good. Third, it needs to be, inarguably, at its core, a restaurant. We could park it all day at Caffe Dante for impeccable food and a beautifully relaxing atmosphere, but it feels more like a (very fine) bar than a dining-first establishment.

And finally, it needs to feel special: A place where you don't just eat but luxuriate. With those terms, here are 20 of the 200 best restaurants in the city.

Sofreh brings a spotless aesthetic and fine dining to amazing Persian homestyle dishes without getting hoity-toity about it. Here it's elevated in the stark contrast between the plate settings and the variety of colors sitting on them. Chef and owner Nasim Alikhani ambitious sublimation without resorting to a trendy litany of tricks that turn so many cuisines into import editions of one another in the city's restaurant scene. Perhaps more importantly, it's a non-vegetarian restaurant where vegetarians don't have to feel like they're missing out. The recommended orders here frequently tilt towards vegetarian if not vegan, so it's a great place for a mixed-diet date that doesn't leave one wondering why they just ordered $30 in steamed green beans. Not the case here. Sofreh is one of the very few places that "You've got to go there to try their rice."

Elegance and class reign here, and yet the entire affair has a homey vibe — perhaps because elements of its interior design stem from Alikhani's life and hometown. The best restaurants always seem to embody some aspect of their chefs' personal experience or opinion rather than shooting for broad appeal. Sofreh does, in fact, feel like a culmination of a lifetime of experiences and learning — as well as an experience that visitors might learn from.

If you want a snapshot of Claro, know that the Michelin-starred Mexican hotspot stone-grinds its own corn meal tortillas from non-GMO corn sourced from Oaxaca. Their contents focus on organic produce, locally sourced as much as it can be. If you know where to sit, you can watch them being pressed and grilled, and Claro's open kitchen plays a big part in turning these devoted dishes into a full-on experience. While the tortillas form the basis for much of the menu, don't miss the mole.

For the bigger picture, Claro is dynamic. The foods change frequently, making it a different experience even for regular devotees. Fitting our mandate for this article, the reservations-only restaurant recommends a two-hour experience with no rush: Only good friends and good times recalling chef T.J. Steele's time in Oaxaca. It's a love letter to authentic Oaxacan cooking and genial eating that's right at home in Brooklyn.

We maintain that East Harlem is the most overlooked eating neighborhood in Manhattan. Apart from the can't-miss Mexican on 116th Street, bested by mainstays Sidewalk Tacos and Cascalote around the corner, there's New York's best Cuban sandwich at Bermudez and the king of chopped cheese at Blue Sky Deli. Despite the recent loss of Mountain Bird, its surviving sister Gaudir still serves up the best tapas in town. Supernice's yeasted doughnuts are actually worth their hefty price. CakeBurger and Amor Cubano could not be more different, but both belong on this list in every way. And when they bounce you from Rao's, at least you've got Patsy's a short stroll away.

Having enumerated all that, know what it must take to arrive in such a scene and make a splash: That's Contento, which rocked all of your won't-travel-uptown minds upon opening its doors. Contento embodies the spirit of this article. Everything is just right: décor, ambiance, food, a fun staff who are attentive but never hover. And while lots of restaurants are wheelchair-accessible, Contento goes beyond accommodation by integrating the design to serve all patrons an equal experience. Intimately sized yet privately arranged, it's both cozy and elegant, making it as comfortable for a first date as it is conducive to an anniversary. The ultimate effect makes this a place to sip an exceptional wine and snack on the bowl of hominy as you peruse the Peruvian menu and admire the floral design. You're lucky to be here.

The recent closing of Malii's northern location was a gut punch, but the Gramercy edition is looking forward, not backward. It expertly replicates the cozy charm of its sister restaurant without duplicating its exact design. It remains an incredibly adorable date night spot. The food is stupendous, and you would never be wrong to get takeout, but when you're here, it feels almost secondary to just how perfectly you could sit and watch the world stroll by on a summer night. The An Chan, a butterfly pea flower cocktail, was made for the 'gram, and Malii's very savvy social campaign has substance behind the glamor. If anything, the actual experience more than lives up to the social posts.

The same team also operates When in Bangkok, a Flushing spot with beauty to spare and personality to back it up. Not only is it the most delicious Thai you're going to find (or at least argue gladly about between Woodside and Hell's Kitchen options), it's a perfect spot to hold your special somebody's hand and just...exhale. Then inhale deeply because the smells coming out of this kitchen are phenomenal.

We thought for a long while about whether or not to pick Masa in what we have dubbed The Rao's Rule. Ultimately, we said yeah, because the bar is not getting a reservation but paying the bill. Here's New York City's most expensive sushi, and it isn't even close at $1,000 a seat. We're not going to debate Masa vs. Nobu vs. Noz, which don't even place by price tag, but let's leave dollar value aside for once. If you can drop a key on sushi, you can afford not to do the mental evaluations about what it's worth. When you expect perfection, everything above a certain level is diminishing returns, so let's leave it at Masa is keenly aware of the value in its entire experience, so the restaurant bans cell phones and photos. 

Masa embodies chef Masayoshi Takayama's philosophy of sublimating a project to the best version of itself, amplifying its essence. It's a tough table to get even for the rich guys, so why wouldn't you practice, however briefly in this nonstop city of distractions, a little focus on the easily contemplated three-Michelin-star experience?

Hard to forget or discern a name like this, Laser Wolf serves kabobs and dips in a competitive-reservation club setting worthy of its name's intensity. Yet despite its hot moment, the food remains at the four rather than this just being a place to be seen. Or to see the views of Manhattan. Nothing breaks the heart like world-class food wasted on a crowd that barely touches it after snapping pics, and thankfully that's not the case here. That said, this is a great place to go when you want to actually enjoy your meal with friends and still have your bragging rights. Getting in won't be easy; getting out will be just as difficult, but more on an emotional level than a reservation one.

Open coals and even wider views of the city make this a fun place to be while further helping to cement the unthinkable: that Brooklyn might have become more crucially cool than Manhattan. The latter has exclusivity, the former has novelty, and we live in an attention economy these days. Laser Wolf gets that (again, see the name) and lives it on a rooftop of a cool hotel. Let the debate begin in the manner of our people: Dancing till the break-a-break-a dawn.

If you can even get a reservation here, the best prime rib in New York awaits you in a setting that feels like something out of a period drama. You don't have to grow a handlebar mustache and doff a bowler hat to dine here, but it can only help the experience. 4 Charles is a stout brick of rich perfection, serving up beef, shellfish, chocolate, digestifs, and atmosphere.

Other meats await, and even the odd vegetable, very good but just as calorically dense after all the added chicken jus and cream sherry. A short but — no surprise here — very respectable assemblage of incredibly intense beers will help seal up that case of gout you began working on with the cocktail tour of the James Bond franchise listed on the 4 Charles menu. You couldn't eat here too often even if you could get the reservation, but when the meal's this dense, it will live forever in lush detail pressed upon your stomach's memory with the subtlety of the Chicxulub crater. Now that's an experience.

There are a hundred restaurants that make Harlem a phenomenal destination, and hold down an inimitable community and character. Sylvia's may be the official heart of Harlem dining, but even so, Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster feels like the next statement in its development.

A multi-cameral venue that continues to add experiences, including a to-go counter that also serves up ice cream, and a new party room with gorgeous design by manager Charles Washington, Red Rooster never stops growing, changing, innovating, and building itself into the surrounding neighborhood. It's impossible to visit and not feel like something important runs through here. It very often manages to feel like multiple celebrations at once, and there's amazing music and food in all of them.

Though he owns restaurants around the globe, Samuelsson has embraced Harlem as his capital. He's half the driving force behind Harlem EatUp!, a food festival that showcases locally-owned businesses and stellar chefs. Red Rooster has achieved primacy not by conquering the Harlem hospitality scene but by elevating everyone around it.

What even is Gabriel Kreuther? The creations here are such visual spectacles they seem to have left food behind to become Tiffany glass. If their textures and colors weren't so alluring to the stomach by way of the eyes, we might mistake a gallery of this French fare for pop art (with a heavy dollop of German influence). This is cutting-edge cuisine despite leaning heavily into mid-20th-century staples. The chocolates look like alien gemstones. This place has two Michelin stars and four from the Crab Nebula — a star system which we fully expect GK to cook perfectly.

And yet, despite being a restaurant that doesn't require you to wear a tie but makes you want to be the kind of person who does, it's eminently fair at the $150-250 range per person (or cheaper at lunch.) When you consider what's coming your way in plentiful portions prepared beyond expert level, it feels like a bargain. You may disagree, but keep telling yourself Eleven Madison Park will ever return to glory while you wait for that Dorsia reservation.

Forget everything we said: It's the food. It's always the food. It just so happens that the scenery at Via Carota, the West Village's darling Italian establishment among many such fine contenders, sells expectations that the food delivers perfectly. Inspired by co-chef/owner Rita Sodi's home in Florence, in full partnership with fellow chef Jody Williams, Via Carota is perfect. Don't take our word for it — listen to the James Beard Awards, the New Yorker, and anyone else lucky enough to grace its threshold.

Via Carota styles itself like your nonna's childhood home and cooks like her nonna was given unlimited resources to perfect recipes from time out of mind. You can't take a bite of anything less than perfect here, and you'll want to sit at this divinely rustic West Village restaurant for as long as they'll let you. The cacao e pepe is the draw for legions of photo-snapping foodies, and it really is that great, but let us tell you about the wonders this haven can wreak from fresh vegetables, bread, and light cheeses on a starting platter. It's a real testament to a place where celebrity sightings feel like a detriment to the experience. Get out of the way, Franco; we're trying to focus on the meal here.