At Sushi Note (a name which could be viewed as an allusion to musical notes, or a note slipped under a door, or even the Blue Note record label), chef Kiminobu Saito tailors each bite of his omakase offering to the rhythms of conversation and whim, in the spirit of the American jazz masters he reveres. Auburn, Los Angeles: Create your own tasting menu in an extraordinary dining room on Melrose. Meanwhile, across the country it's another curry, this one spiked with lychee and chrysanthemum and host to delicate chunks of white crab, that I dream of returning to at Hanumanh, in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Among the more delightful manifestations of the trend can be found at Brooklyn's Maison Yaki, the second restaurant from Greg Baxtrom, who also owns Olmsted, across the street. The long-overdue rise of African-American chefs around the country is the most exciting culinary movement in the world. When I think of the last days of the old ways, the months last winter that I traveled the country in an attempt to see America through the lens of its new restaurants and name the best of them, four words stick in my mind. “Is fine dining dead?” inquired a companion early in my travels. Seven Reasons at 2208 Fourteenth Street NW, As I held an oyster to my nose, I noticed something. I wish you could try the weird and wonderful endive salad at Paju, in Seattle, each leaf cradling walnuts, burrata, and an emulsified, jelly-like smoked vinaigrette, like a delirious '70s canapé. Leila, in downtown Detroit, was brought to life by the scion of a famous Lebanese restaurant family. The five-course dinners cost in the neighborhood of $60 and are served in a small, spare front room. Dear John’s, the deliciously retro brainchild of chef Hans Röckenwagner and his wife and business partner, Patti, as well as chef Josiah Citrin, is a time capsule with a shelf life: The building will be torn down in April 2021. Both Bartlow and head bartender Sarah Morrissey did time at the James Beard Award-winning Frenchette, and the place has some of that restaurant's bonhomie—a sense of being in exactly the right room in the right city, with the beautiful company coming for the food and not the other way around. BEST NEW RESTAURANTS IN NYC. There's a calibrated thrum of spiciness throughout, neither dull nor overwhelming. From Kikko in Chicago to Berlu in Portland to Hestia in Austin, these are the top 10 restaurants to open in the past year. It's the most thrilling dish I ate all year. Seems the Esquire food critic was in there. So Do Black-Owned Businesses. Laser Wolf, Philadelphia: Michael Solomonov's latest is a raucous Israeli grill house. Sunny takes us inside Tim Ho Wan in the video below and shares some of her favorite items off the menu! The recent national penchant for skewers of various origins—Middle Eastern, Thai, Japanese—presents this administrative work at its most granular. There are riotous brunch dishes like a bowl of creamed corn and Parmesan you might declare cloying until you find yourself mopping up the last bits in the dish with roti. I speak, of course, of the fabled White Tablecloth—stand-in for an entire set of Eurocentric conventions that once narrowly defined fine dining, and the most mythologized piece of laundry since the Shroud of Turin. No one’s complaining. (The remainder of the restaurant is a natural-wine bar with a limited food menu I wish was bigger.) But try as you might to remain skeptical, there’s no denying the righteousness of that slow-smoked beef rib when chef Doug Adams slips on the black rubber gloves and starts carving you a slab. For another, there's still an awful lot of fanciness out there. What I really fell for at Maison Yaki is that it's sneakily a sauce restaurant, a one-kitchen devotional to the great classical French “mothers”—velouté, hollandaise, béchamel, et al.—and their offspring. Ten minutes north of the White House and its sour, divisive rhetoric, immigrants are throwing a party. Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent . From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. It’s a place to chow down and loosen up as you distribute warm embraces to friends from the old neighborhood and friends you just met fifteen minutes ago. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. “For best results, don't wait, eat quickly,” reads a note on the blackboard behind the counter, though the length of lunch depends mightily on whether anybody asks Hong a question about, say, Hon Hamachi, a trademarked strain of farmed yellowtail, which may lead to a lecture on fish anatomy, a disquisition on the Japanese killing method known as ikejime, a metaphysical exploration of why we need labels for things anyway, and so on. As I type, every one of those 93 restaurants I visited is either closed, limited to takeout and delivery, or, it seems clear, will soon be one or the other. The 16 Best New Restaurants in America. There are classic entrées like bacalao a la Vizcaina and squid in its own ink sauce here, but the highlights are front-loaded, starting with a bell-shaped mound of freshly fried potato chips hung like a miniature Christmas tree with sheets of Ibérico ham. We’re rooting for her. 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