Tag: Awards

Bon Appétit Just Released Its List of the Best New Restaurants in the US for 2025

Every September, food media rolls out its picks for the year’s most exciting places to eat — and Bon Appétit has just dropped its 2025 Best New Restaurants list. While it’s not the only voice in the conversation, the roundup offers a useful snapshot of how dining in America is evolving. This year’s collection of 20 restaurants leans heavily into storytelling: chefs using their menus to explore identity, migration, and memory.

Instead of headline-grabbing gimmicks, the restaurants Bon Appétit highlights are rooted in personal history and a sense of place. In San Francisco, Fernay McPherson’s Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement feels like a homecoming, with soulful plates that link her family’s past to the present-day Fillmore district. In Seattle, Lenox channels chef Jhonny Reyes’s Puerto Rican roots into dishes that also celebrate the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. His crackling lechon with farm-fresh mustard greens bridges San Juan, New York, and Seattle in a single dish.

Lenox in Seattle

The list also celebrates bold expressions of cultural fusion. In Atlanta, Avize looks like a traditional Alpine restaurant until a plate of frog legs dusted with Atlanta’s own lemon-pepper seasoning lands at the table. The dish captures the dual identity of chef Jason Paolini’s project: European at first glance, Southern at its core. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Dōgon marks the triumphant return of star chef Kwame Onwuachi, who pays homage to the city’s Ethiopian and Trinidadian communities with Wagyu short ribs in smoky awaze sauce and fried lamb surrounded by curried chickpeas.

Not every entry is high-profile. In Pittsburgh, Fet-Fisk has transformed a Little Italy bar into a Nordic-leaning hotspot where diners sip marigold schnapps alongside pickled mackerel. In New York, Ha’s Snack Bar (pictured above) has become the city’s buzziest reservation, serving Vietnamese-French small plates from a chalkboard menu that changes nightly — a place so coveted that reservations vanish as soon as they’re posted.

What unites these 20 restaurants isn’t cuisine or geography, but intimacy. Bon Appétit’s editors describe them as meals you won’t experience anywhere else, each one shaped by the specific journey of the chef who created it. In a year where dining out has to be more than just dinner, this list proves that the most exciting restaurants in America are memoirs you can eat.

North America’s 50 Best Restaurants Honours Quebec’s Tanière3 for Art of Hospitality

When it comes to unforgettable dining, atmosphere and service can be just as memorable as what’s on the plate. That’s why North America’s 50 Best Restaurants created the Art of Hospitality Award — and this year, the very first honour goes to Tanière3 in Quebec City.

Set in the vaulted cellars of two historic houses between the St. Lawrence River and Place Royale, Tanière3 is an immersion into Quebec’s culinary soul. Chef François-Emmanuel Nicol and co-owner Roxan Bourdelais have reimagined fine dining as a story of place: 10 to 15 seasonal courses crafted almost entirely from Quebec-sourced (often foraged) ingredients, each one revealed in real time to keep curiosity alive until the very last bite.

Guests can choose between the Chef’s Counter Cellar, where you watch the team at work and interact with Nicol directly, or the Dining Room Cellar, an equally atmospheric but more traditional setting. Whichever path you take, expect hospitality that feels deeply personal — a hallmark of the Tanière3 experience.

As William Drew, Director of Content for North America’s 50 Best Restaurants, put it: “Tanière3 delivers far more than just fine dining – it offers a personal experience rooted in the warmth, care, and pride of Quebec.”

The 2025 awards ceremony takes place September 25 in Las Vegas, when the full list of North America’s 50 Best Restaurants will be revealed. Until then, Quebec has every reason to celebrate: one of its most innovative dining rooms has just been recognized as setting the gold standard for hospitality.