Pandemic be damned, New Yorkers love restaurants. After the citywide shutdown that began in March, 2020, it was heartening that many restaurants survived, even if just barely, by keeping on a skeleton crew to offer highly sanitary, socially distanced takeout. This was of great solace to homebound residents growing increasingly tired of their own cooking, and the precarious food-delivery economy was injected with new vibrancy by the short-lived fifteen months of legalized cocktails-to-go. (On June 24, 2021, in a Grinchian move, Governor Andrew Cuomo ended this policy, along with the state of emergency. Define “emergency.”) Meanwhile, enterprising chefs who found themselves suddenly stuck at home without employment, or needing to pivot their businesses, devised new delivery and pickup services of all kinds, buoying spirits with hot chicken, baguettes, vegan Ethiopian cuisine, ham, chilaquiles, and lots of groceries—not to mention Instagram Live parties and meal-kit tutorials. Stanley Tucci even made a Negroni.

Then things started to pick up. In June, 2020, restaurants were permitted to build outdoor dining structures—and they went to town, to the dismay of anyone who had to park a car or live upstairs, and to the relief of those desperate for some semblance of normalcy. (Outdoor structures have been approved through at least 2022.) In the spring and summer, thanks to vaccinations, COVID numbers inched downward, vaccinated diners were allowed back inside, and many restaurants, big and small, began to open. (According to Eater, about seven hundred restaurants opened between March and May this year.)

The great news is that a lot of those new restaurants, based on what New Yorker writers have tried, are truly wonderful, providing fresh points of view and delicious food—and the creativity, diversity, and conviviality that the city thrives on. (The bad news is that COVID numbers are going back up, affecting many restaurants around town, and nationwide, with outbreaks and closures. Get your booster shot.) Some notable places that began life as pop-ups during the pandemic have, since we wrote about them, morphed into full-fledged restaurants: Dame, on MacDougal Street, started as a small fish-and-chips spot and now offers an intriguing dinner menu featuring seafood galore; Rolo’s, which beganas a grocery in Ridgewood, Queens, has become a destination for a chic evening starring cocktails and cheesy potato croquettes. Others, many listed here and excerpted from Tables for Two, are among the best new restaurants in the city.

Jonathan Waxman has been cooking in élite circles since the seventies, when he worked at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, and there are roots to his past everywhere you look. Attie created an even bigger oven than the first one—a must for all the chickens Waxman serves. “I’ll have a dead chicken head on my grave, I’m sure,” he cracked.

—Shauna Lyon

Because Qianlong’s Favorite Eel had sold out, she chose Qianlong’s Favorite Fish Head, which turned out to have belonged to an enormous grass carp. A platter larger than any human head arrived. The meat was pliant and custard-like, steamed to the texture of trembly silk. But it was the broth that was otherworldly, sweet and spicy, complex and vibrant.

—Jiayang Fan

One afternoon last month, I picked up two orders of pelmeni—small, circular dumplings, arguably ancient in origin, that the Quinns make using a Soviet-era honeycomb-shaped mold. I figured that they’d last for several meals; a single bite of one slippery, thin-skinned parcel, and so much for that. The first batch, filled with tender ground pork and grated onion, was tossed lightly in smetana (a cousin to crème fraîche) and finished with fresh-cracked pepper and dill. The second variety, in homage to the Georgian cheese bread khachapuri, contained a luscious, salty meld of feta, ricotta, mozzarella, and goat cheese, their butter-slicked exteriors feathered with shavings of cured egg yolk.

—Hannah Goldfield

In the early two-thousands, an aspiring stage actress named Suzaan Hauptfleisch left South Africa for Manhattan. Broadway never called, and this town’s culinary scene is all the better for it. The city has seven thousand four hundred and thirty working actors. It has exactly one South African restaurant and bar: Hauptfleisch’s Kaia, an Upper East Side institution that, in its eleven years, has supplied New Yorkers with 7.2 million dollars’ worth of South African wine, mostly by the glass.

—David Kortava

The other night at Dhamaka, a new Indian restaurant in Essex Market, on the Lower East Side, my dining companions and I took turns dragging our spoons through a hot metal pot of gurda kapoora, searching for offal. Which morsels, we wondered, were the goat kidneys and which were the goat testicles? The one male in our group joked that, as the only person among us in possession of both organs, he was uniquely qualified to tell. In all seriousness, he had eaten a lot of kidney as a child in Russia, and recognized it to be the firmer of the two organs—it was almost bouncy in texture, with a pronounced flavor that bloomed slowly and grew funkier. I preferred the testicle, meaty but mild, as supple as sweetbread, nearly spreadable.

—H.G.

We had heard that Haizea served goose barnacles—bowls of what look like red-tipped dragon toenails, captioned “Percebes from the north of Spain” on Instagram—but they weren’t on the menu. Did they have any? Luis, his eyes wide with excitement, said, “Do we have barnacles? Yes, we have them! They are very expensive.” Could we try them? “You know why they’re so expensive? Because people kill themselves to get them. They wait for the tide, they have thirty seconds before a wave comes, they dive down, then clack-clack-clack, they get them.”

—S.L.

At their most successful, Han’s creations are dazzlingly poetic. Take the yellowtail dish, which grew out of Han’s frustration with the usual presentation of his favorite fish. “I’ve only seen it served flat, and I wanted to give it height,” he told me. His solution—to sandwich a thin sashimi slice between translucent wafers of Asian pear—is elegant and sculptural, evoking a fish swimming through an emerald-and-yellow pool of scallion oil and lemon juice.

—J.F.

Where else but in New York City would you find a chef from Gravesend, Brooklyn, who’s the daughter of an Italian mother and an Indonesian father, at a restaurant named after an Israeli marketplace, making an incredible twist on a popular Turkish snack? You’ll find this—the chef Ayesha Nurdjaja and her gozleme, a stuffed, pan-fried bread—and much more at Shukette, a Middle Eastern restaurant in Chelsea.

—S.L.