This year’s New York City restaurant award winners have a point of view, and they’re sticking to it. Their menus tell a story about where the chefs grew up, who trained them, and how they like to cook. Some give a familiar kind of restaurant a fresh reason
to exist; others bring together ingredients you might not expect to share a menu.
These new restaurants also gave us reasons to keep going out in a year when everything got more expensive. Not every pick here is a bargain, but they’re generous in how you’re treated, what’s on the plate, and often what you’re paying for. These restaurants make dinner feel like a good use of time and money. In New York right now, that’s everything. Without further ado, here are the 2026 selections, and don’t miss the rest of the 2026 Eater Awards, presented by Capital One.
Best New Restaurant: Somssi
Somssi, from Ahris Kim and chef Daniel Gronert, is one of the clearest examples in New York of a restaurant that goes all-in on personal history, rather than focusing on the broader food culture of any one country or a region.
Korea-born Kim, who ran operations at Atomix,lived in Indonesia and the Philippines before moving to Wisconsin with her family. Gronert, who has German roots and spent time as a pitmaster in South Carolina, cooked across restaurants in Atomix’s parent company. Those influences show up in dishes like the caviar-crowned Potato Potato Potato, a crispy-soft tater tot simulacrum nested on miso hollandaise; ox tongue grilled and glazed with tare, a kaleidoscope of textures; and pork schnitzel presented like shrimp toast (it works).
With the team’s fine dining pedigree, Somssi sets a high bar for hospitality, yet it’s still casual: The room is designed to feel like a home, and the menu nods to places Kim and Gronert have lived.
The bar extends that expertise. Christian Gray’s cocktails include well-made minis, which the bartenders are game to explain to curious drinkers. Sommelier (and Punch contributor) Jenny Eagleton’s list of wines and sakes leans toward lesser-known areas. The duo and their staff reward handing your night over to them, whether you’re there with a group or alone with a Kindle.
Personal touches carry through the space in gloriously analog fashion. Lace curtains on the door spell out the restaurant’s name in embroidery, and handprints line the bathroom wall, left by the broader constellation of people who helped build Somssi into the singular restaurant it is today. — Nadia Chaudhury, deputy editor, Eater New York
Chef of the Year: Ned Baldwin, Zoli
Chef Ned Baldwin has spent more than a decade winning over diners at Houseman in Hudson Square: His restaurant has become the kind of neighborhood fixture any chef would wish to run. Among its regulars are contemporary art center founders, Lonti Ebers and her husband, Bruce Flatt, of Amant: The couple later recruited Baldwin to open Zoli, adjacent to their gallery, after watching him steer Houseman through thick and thin. It was a smart pick. Without fine dining fussiness, Baldwin glams up pole beans with a soy-pickling, he roasts okra for skewers, and he tucks Sungolds with romano beans to make a case for ordering well beyond the fish offerings he’s known for. Still, don’t skip the surf clams with avocado and serrano or the triggerfish with leeks — or really any seafood on the menu, particularly fish Baldwin has caught himself out East.
Baldwin’s strength extends to the people cooking alongside him. A generous mentor, he brought Houseman pastry chef Nicole Sheets to Zoli to offer a bigger kitchen and better tools. His restaurant has become a next step for chefs who used to work at standouts like Frenchette, Wildair, and Estela. Baldwin’s achievement here is bigger than a handful of excellent dishes: With his team and his benefactors, he has built a compelling restaurant destination that gives his team room to grow. — Melissa McCart, dining editorial manager
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Best New Bakery: Diljān
With both Afghan and Latin American influences, Diljān gives New Yorkers a bakery with a point of view and innumerable reasons to become a regular. Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi, owners of Astoria’s Little Flower Cafe, teamed up with Bryan Ford, Honduran American baker and cookbook author, to conceptualize the bakery, now perched on a corner near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights.
Their combined talent makes for some of the city’s most compelling baked goods. For the Saffron Shah, laminated pastry holds delicate saffron cream in the shape of a crescent, an important Islamic symbol. Halwa tops the sticky bun, while a swirl of samosa pastry wraps halal lamb under a dusting of powdered sugar. Don’t miss the enormous Afghan flatbread crowned by toppings such as halal beef bacon with scallions or sour cherry cream cheese. The team has also branched into pizzas topped with cheese and Afghan cumin, kofta kebabs, or beef pepperoni. Look for specials like the flan with cardamom-poached apricots and conchas stuffed with firni, a rice pudding. — NC
Dish of the Year: Badaboom
In 2026, one marriage took the food zeitgeist by storm: a holy union between the natural wine bar and roast chicken. The once-casual dinner has been made chic and, increasingly, expensive. Over the past year, New York has watched the category proliferate, and the price of the humble bird climb with it. We’ve debated $99 whole chickens and $84 halves, wondering when roast chicken became the “it” girl of special-occasion meals.
Badaboom seemed to be listening. After catching heat for its $32 half bird, the wine bar announced a pay-what-you-wish chicken night in plain text on Instagram, right in the middle of the trend’s biggest wave. It was a perfect little act of one-upmanship, and diners ate it up. But even when the one-night stunt was over, Badaboom kept the momentum going, permanently slashing the half chicken’s price during happy hour to $16 from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Walking through the door at Badaboom, the first thing you see is the rotisserie oven with its golden birds spinning away in synchrony. Here, Watkins Poultry chickens roast at 175 degrees until the skin turns mahogany brown and mottled in places, and the succulent thigh meat pulls a bit from the bone. It’s then perched on a hill of quartered potatoes — no doubt braised in chicken fat — crowned with a halved head of roasted garlic, and surrounded by a moat of deeply savory chicken gravy. Aside from making the chicken delicious, Badaboom understood the cultural moment at play — that prices are as pressing a dinner table topic as ever — and decided to answer it in the most satisfying way possible. — Nat Belkov, deputy brand director
Best Steakhouse in the Year of the Steakhouse: Graciela
It came as no surprise that steak would be stellar at West Village newcomer Graciela: Restaurateur Pablo Rivero is also behind Don Julio, a world-famous ode to wood-fired meat in Buenos Aires. At the New York restaurant, coals of white quebracho, an Argentine hardwood, glow along the wall of the open kitchen, draping rib-eyes and New York strips with a sultry shroud of smoke. In a city full of steakhouses that draw on midcentury Americana, Graciela looks to the Argentine parrilla instead.
As with most steakhouses, Graciela has far more to give than just its steak. Marinated peppers hum with the same alluring char, as does the bread that accompanies the broccoli dip, showered in dainty curls of aged cheddar. Meat lovers mustn’t stop at the steaks. Find iron-rich morcilla, meant to be broken up among greens and an orange-yolked egg, and empanadas filled with savory osso buco. The fries sit among the city’s best new entrants, fluffy as a baked potato inside with chip-crisp exterior. The restaurant’s generosity is apparent: Diners get handed glasses of limonada at the door; after ordering ice cream, an additional glistening scoop may show up on the table. This restaurant wants to give you many reasons to be here. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter
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Punch’s Best New Bar: Echo Lake
If you read Punch, you may recognize Echo Lake’s founders, Paul McGee and Chloe Frechette. McGee used to run the Milk Room, Three Dots and a Dash, and Lost Lake, iconic bars that cemented him as one of Chicago’s most influential bartenders. A few years ago, he made the move to New York to go into business with Frechette (formerly this Punch’s executive editor), who has a literal master’s degree thesis on cocktail culture. Together, the pair offer a rare and delightful combination of carefully honed hospitality muscles and years of drink scholarship.
Echo Lake — its name a callback to Lost Lake — is different from any of McGee’s previous bars. Rather than the culturally flattening island fantasy of tiki, this bar leans into the history of rum and the places in which it’s made, showing that the spirit is more interesting than the fantasy. The selection of bottles on the backbar has been pared to a tight but rotating edit of spirits used across the menu; the Cherry Colored Funk contains charanda, a Michoacan-made sugarcane spirit, while in the Seaweed Daiquiri, there’s grassy and saline rhum agricole from Martinique. Frechette and McGee see their guests as “skimmers, dippers, and deep divers,” based on the depth of their rum knowledge, and they have something for everyone. The deeper you dive, the more you’ll find yourself asking questions about what makes rum rum.
When you’re ready to plunge deeper, downstairs from Echo Lake you’ll find Undercurrent, a cocktail geek dream with one of the most exciting backbars in the city. There’s a strong emphasis on rare rums, but you’ll also find things like bottles of no longer produced amaro from the ’60s. Go to Undercurrent to riddle through your most challenging questions about cocktail lore — the owners are there, every day, happy to answer them — and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to try something as old as the history you’re asking about. — Jenny Eagleton, Punch contributor
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