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Great meals can be found in virtually any corner of the five boroughs, but here are some areas that stood out to our critic.
The chief critic based in New York, Ligaya Mishan spent more than 10 months dining out to report the list of the 100 best restaurants in the city.
Published May 10, 2026Updated May 11, 2026, 11:29 a.m. ET
Elmhurst Rules
So much happiness in a single mile in Queens. Elmhurst is a thicket of possibilities; almost every storefront beckons. To the west of the Elmhurst Avenue subway stop, along Broadway and Woodside Avenue, is an astonishment of small, idiosyncratically chic Thai restaurants, bars and cafes. (Three — Khao Kang, Saranrom and Zaab Zaab — appear on The Times’s list of the 100 best restaurants in New York, but I could easily have included more.) To the south and east, the Malaysian and Taiwanese stalwarts Taste Good and Taiwanese Gourmet remain bluntly functional and great (and cash-only) after all these decades. Walk to the next stop, Grand Avenue-Newtown, and cross Queens Boulevard to reach Warung Selasa at the tiny Indonesian grocery Indo Java. Every Tuesday, Anastasia Dewi Tjahjadi makes a set $15 lunch heaped on a banana leaf, mostly for takeout, since there are just two folding tables set up between the shelves. Ms. Tjahjadi has no plans for expansion. “This is unique,” she says. The same could be said for the whole neighborhood.
Chinatown Welcomes the World
Since Cantonese migrants first found refuge here in the late 19th century, Chinatown has both grown and diminished, sprawling into surrounding areas even as it contends with gentrification and population decline. It’s still one of the city’s most vital quarters, its make-do spirit sustained by restaurants high and low, Chinese and beyond. Go back to its original crooked lanes and you’ll find the veteran Hop Lee, where the waiters still wear red jackets and the cooks understand velvet as a verb, not far from the newcomer Lei, scandalizing the older generation by serving chrysanthemum greens raw and lily bulbs on crudo. The Canal Arcade, a covered passageway once thronged by herbal pharmacies and Cantopop record shops, now houses several discreet Japanese restaurants, including Kono, a temple to yakitori. To the east, tiny Mắm channels the energy of a night in Hanoi, and the modernist Mexican spot Corima makes the best tortillas in town on a flipped-over wok. Closer to the river, Golden Diner celebrates the motley New York pantry, with gochujang on the burger and Thai tea in the tres leches cake.
The East Village Finds Space
How does a neighborhood keep its identity over time? The East Village has been aided to some extent by the peculiarities of its real estate: old tenements built on marshlands, cut up into narrow apartments (some still with the bathtub in the kitchen), and under it all, subterranean streams that threaten to flood the basements every time it rains. Grit, attitude, bravado: Compact Carnitas Ramirez hands out offal tacos to diners perched on upturned buckets, moody Smithereens collects fish bones in a moody catacomb of a dining room, and Superiority Burger — in the former home of Odessa, the beloved Ukrainian diner — proves that there are no limits to what a vegetable can be. Ho Foods, with its hot creamy soy milk and profoundly deep beef noodle soup, has two cubbyholes of storefronts and is still tiny. Intimate Penny and Claud, upstairs and downstairs in the same building, make a virtue of railroad layouts. And the room at Bánh Anh Em is all naked pipes and clamor, befitting its no-reservations, eat-like-you’re-on-the-street credo.
