Chef Anthony Mangieri from Una Pizza Napoletana, whose pizza was crowned the best in the U.S. in 2025, takes Eater on a tour of his favorite restaurants in NYC for tastes of creamy cheesecake, a juicy burger, and more.

Mangieri starts his day with a cycle around town to clear his head, before getting a slice of cheesecake at Veniero’s Pasticceria e Caffé, a dessert that he’s been enjoying for more than 30 years. The Sicilian-style cake is made with alternating layers of sponge cake soaked in rum, maraschino cherries, and a dense cannoli cream, encased in a buttery pie dough. Mangieri talks about the history behind the cheesecake, which is cooked in a. century-old underground oven. “You can’t fake that kind of stuff, that comes from years of hard work, and repetition, and passion, and family, and it really touches me,” he says.

He then makes his way to Hearth, for one of his favorite burgers. The restaurant is rooted in Tuscan culinary traditions, but with plenty of American spins. The Variety Burger literally uses a variety of meats: beef heart, liver, brisket, bone marrow, and beef chuck are ground into a thick patty that is topped with fontina cheese from Italy and caramelized onions. “To me its insane that this burger is not on the top of every burger list in the United States,” he says, noting that the burger transcends the traditional idea of a burger and is one of the most incredible meals he’s had.

Next is D. Coluccio & Sons, a sandwich shop and market that has been distributing cheese, tomatoes, and olive oil directly imported from Italy since 1978. Mangieri goes shopping, highlighting some of his favorites for cooking at home or to inspire new dishes at the restaurant.

Finally, Mangieri makes it to his final stop at Casa Enrique. Chef and owner Cosme Aguilar takes him into the kitchen for a look behind the scenes. Mangieri and his family then dig into tacos, enchiladas, and a spicy shrimp dish. “There’s just a lot of layers of flavor going on, everything is really thoughtful, you can taste each ingredient, and I think that’s kind of a commonality in everything we experienced today on our day off, and that’s kind of the way I eat,” he says.

Watch the most recent episode of Chef’s Day Off to see how chef Anthony Mangieri spends his day off at his favorite restaurants, bakeries, and shops around New York City.

By and large, most diners at Cote, the sleek and club-like New York City steakhouse, order the Butcher’s Feast. For $82 per person, diners get four cuts of beef, grilled tableside. But there is no creamed spinach here, nor loaded baked potatoes: Instead, there is banchan, like kimchi and pickled daikon; scallion salad, with gochugaru vinaigrette; lettuce leaves, with a side of ssamjang; gyeran-jjim, renamed on the menu as “savory egg souffle”; and bubbling clay pots of both kimchi stew and doenjang stew, served with rice. 

Many customers, specifically non-Korean ones, don’t know what the stews are, explains owner Simon Kim, but the meat makes them more amenable, putting them in “the vibe,” according to Kim. “It’s an experience that some of the meat-and-potato guys wouldn’t have taken otherwise, and they’re open to it,” he says. “They came for the steak, and they stay for the kimchi.” 

Cote is, Kim emphasizes, not the typical Korean barbecue restaurant, but a Korean steakhouse. This distinction mattered to him, like the difference between a bistro and brasserie. He wanted fun and fire, but also 1,200 labels of wine, dry-aged wagyu, and caviar — to merge the energy of the Korean barbecue restaurant with the well-established luxury of the American steakhouse. 

Before Cote opened in 2017, Kim received warnings about his concept. With millennials eating much less red meat than older generations,  the steakhouse was on the decline, advisers said. Recent years have proven this false, however. Not only has the steakhouse surged in a wave of nostalgic dining, overcoming even spiking beef prices, but Cote has succeeded, still impossible to book nearly a decade in and now with swanky outposts in Miami, Singapore, and Las Vegas. 

The revival of the classic American steakhouse symbolizes a specific cultural moment, but the rise of the new American steakhouse — as evidenced by restaurants like Cote, NYC’s Cuerno, San Diego’s Animae, and Las Vegas’s Maroon — might symbolize a more interesting one. 

In our current dining culture, the steakhouse represents dueling sensibilities. Here, of course, is the presiding take: The steakhouse is a symbol of the current shift toward conservatism. The right has long stoked the image of its opponents as soft, timid soy-eaters, themselves as the macho party of meat and potatoes; the steakhouse is their stronghold, its standardized menu asserting a particular Americana. The steakhouse is risk-averse and resistant to new ideas, satisfied enough in its own timeless format. 

The steakhouse is, Jessica Sidman wrote in 2024, “tradition and masculinity… It’s America First (never mind if the cooks and valets are immigrants).” It’s for reasons like these, argued Alicia Kennedy, that the current steakhouse revival cannot be politically neutral: It is a “collective fever dream in which the right-wing, masculinist approach of the carnivores has found a palatable way into polite society.”

But perhaps the steakhouse can instead assert another America: the one built by immigrants and enslaved people, for whom status and power have been hard-won. If the steakhouse protects a certain vision of Americanness through the standardization of its menu and the trappings of tradition, is it possible for the steakhouse, in slightly different form, to also subvert these standards? This rising wave of steakhouses suggests so. 

Sneakily, the steakhouse has emerged as a kind of Trojan horse: a venue in which globalization is championed, where foreign flavors are rendered more familiar, the borders between cuisines become more permeable, and immigrant chefs elevate their cultures to new levels of prestige. 

Since 2021, Tara Monsod has been the executive chef at Animae, a glitzy, velvet-draped Asian American steakhouse in San Diego. Amid the city’s more traditional establishments like Ruth’s Chris and Morton’s, Animae stands out, pairing its dry-aged rib-eyes with banchan and painting its pork tomahawk with a glistening, sweet beet glaze in the style of Filipino tocino. “It’s presented simply like a steak — but not a steak, and still very much Filipino, but with the visual appeal of a steakhouse,” Monsod says. One doesn’t have to understand tocino to try it; in the milieu of the steakhouse, meat is a universal language. “At the end of the day, it’s a slab of meat that they can’t resist.”

Look past the big meats, and Monsod’s subversion of the steakhouse makes itself more clear. Onto Animae’s menu she sneaks chicken cooked into adobong pula, reddened with annatto oil, and pancit palabok, luxed-up with lobster, trout roe, and bucatini. In other dishes, what she’s doing is more “bridging the gap.” Take her potatoes, crisped in beef fat then served with a smear of koji-spiked sour cream and dollops of Chinese sausage jam, evoking a baked potato. Initially, Monsod resisted potatoes. “It’s an Asian restaurant,” she says. “But people associate potatoes with steakhouse, so I gave in.”

That push and pull exists on both sides of the proposition. The power of the steakhouse is that, for many people, it’s “unintimidating,” conjuring comforting expectations of Caesar salads and creamed spinach. This is important in a city like San Diego, where the culinary scene is still “growing,” Monsod says. This is also its opportunity: She can hook diners in with a keyword, promising something familiar, then sneak in something unexpected. Her Caesar salad, for example, is layered with nori flakes and crispy baby anchovies. “You catch them with the very American side,” she says. 

Later this month, chef Kwame Onwuachi will open Maroon, a Caribbean steakhouse in Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. It offers a telling of history one might not expect to see from a steakhouse, which most might associate with a somewhat sanitized nostalgia of the United States’s past. Onwuachi’s restaurant gets its name from Maroons, the escaped and freed slaves who went on to create their own communities in Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Through the restaurant, Onwuachi says, “I’m able to tell the story of the Maroons and that story of survival.” 

Onwuachi writes of 17th-century Jamaica in his 2019 memoir; it’s cited on Maroon’s website, explaining the restaurant’s backstory. When Britain captured the colony from Spain, some Spaniards freed or left behind their slaves. These Maroons, he writes, hid out in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, where they lived a “hardscrabble existence” of subsistence farming and the occasional raid on the British occupiers. “In order to not reveal their location, they built these jerk pits and then covered them, so the smoke wouldn’t reveal where they were. Through that came the invention of jerk cuisine,” Onwuachi says. 

Because of these origins, the scholar Tao Leigh Goffe describes jerk as “a cuisine outside of and in opposition to the European colonial and Creole palate.” And yet, here it is: central to one of the Strip’s most anticipated new openings, beckoning anyone in Vegas looking for a good time. At Maroon, the live-fire jerk pit takes center stage. It’s the restaurant’s heart, from which the 30-day rum-aged steaks, racks of lamb, and chicken — brined, marinated, and smoked in a four-day process — will emerge. While the restaurant will have the requisite steakhouse dishes like steak tartare, “the things that are coming out of the pit are really, really signature,” according to Onwuachi. 

In this way, Maroon builds on what Onwauchi has done with his NYC restaurant Tatiana, notably in its claiming of a place of power. Tatiana is located in the complex of Lincoln Center, the construction of which, as Pete Wells wrote in his 2023 review, resulted in the destruction of a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. It reestablishes a tether to a history that might otherwise be whitewashed. Power is central to Vegas and to the very concept of the steakhouse; the story of Maroon is a reminder that subversion is its own kind of power, too.

Steakhouses promise that anyone dining there deserves the luxury experience. Still, what cuisines have historically won this luxury treatment? For those that are, more commonly, relegated to the “cheap eats” margins, the steakhouse — with its self-assured entitlement to its level of expense — can challenge perceptions. 

In his early travels abroad, Mexican restaurateur Alberto Martínez found Mexican culture derided, its food reduced to nachos, tacos, and tamales. For Cuerno, the NYC restaurant he opened in the summer of 2025, Martínez chose the language of Mexican steakhouse over Mexican restaurant precisely because he knew the latter would evoke “tequila, donkeys, burritos, and other things that we are not,” he says.

Cuerno serves steaks crusted in Mexican salt — $188 for a tomahawk — and other dishes that are meant to evoke Northern Mexico’s carne asada culture. Its salad is not Caesar but César de Tijuana, topped with chicharron croutons, in a reminder that despite the dish’s frequent association with Italian restaurants, it really is a Mexican invention. Cuerno is the first U.S. venture from Martínez, who previously ran high-end restaurants across Mexico as part of the Costeño Group. 

As a 16-year-old, Martínez opened his first food business in Mexico, a very small taco stand that sold only steak tacos, topped with a bit of bone marrow and salsa verde; everyone in his hometown hired him to cater their parties. Despite the affection for Mexican dishes like tacos and tamales among non-Mexican clientele, there remains an unspoken price ceiling for what certain foods should cost in the U.S. At Cuerno, that dish of humble beginnings has been reenvisioned into a showy signature worthy of a Midtown steakhouse. Order the Taco Taquero, and a server wheels over a cart to chop the inclusions tableside. The mixture then goes into tacos — $42 for three. In the context of the steakhouse, though, people are willing to pay for meat. 

The thwack of knife against wood that percusses through the dining room tells the story that Martínez wanted to put forth with Cuerno. “It’s a very special sound that reminds me of the north of Mexico,” he says. “I wanted people to hear that sound and [for it to] become something very familiar.” In NYC, “all the kitchens are powered by Mexicans,” Martínez says. “But very few places really represent us.” 

Monsod has found a similar contradiction between the expectations set by the steakhouse, and where people — even within her community — expect to see Filipino food. “People don’t want to pay more for Asian food, or for Filipino food specifically,” she says. Especially among her parents’ generation, “I feel like sometimes there’s this fear or embarrassment that, for whatever reason, our food is not worthy to be in a space like that.”

For these diners, her goal is for Animae to inspire a new pride. An expensive dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows, gold accents, and lush fabrics — where cultural foods otherwise taken for granted are instead presented with tweezered polish — looks like some level of making it, after all. “I think once they experience that,” she says,  “They can break down that idea of where our food [is] versus where it can be.” 

It’s all a little more complicated than that, though. Getting diners to take interest in “foreign” flavors doesn’t actually shift the culture at large in a more progressive direction. People who vote against immigrants still like tacos, maybe even more so when they’re filled with perfectly charred steak and served in spaces smoothed by the steakhouse’s shimmery opulence. The steakhouse is still predicated upon reinforcing the status quo — just look at the way chefs have to conform to its conventions. 

Maybe it’s a naive illusion to believe that the steakhouse can mean anything other than what it has always meant. But can’t it also be the scaffolding for something new, and isn’t it invigorating to see something reworked to be a vehicle toward the opposite perspective? In these steakhouses, the borders between cultures are open; cuisines meld.

Simon Kim describes his Korean steakhouse as embracing “the power of ‘and.’” Cote is a place where the American steakhouse and the Korean barbecue restaurant both realize they can take some cues from the other. It’s a place, Kim is proud to say, where big spenders buying bottles in the thousands share a dining room with NYU students on the rare splurge, both of them sitting down for the same Butcher’s Feast. “Our dining room feels more like a coral reef than a group of sharks,” Kim says. 

The steakhouse is the staid, protective nostalgia of the old, and the steakhouse can also be the tradition-pushing promise of the new.

If you’ve never tried Goop Kitchen, Gwyneth Paltrow’s takeout-only, nutritious food operation, you’re missing out. No matter what you think of the Hollywood star or her lifestyle and wellness brand, the consensus in LA restaurant circles is the company’s food is shockingly good. Chef Josiah Citrin, of two-Michelin-starred Mélisse, is a big fan, while Marissa Hermer of Palm Springs’ Bar Issi says she orders it all the time. Eater editor Nicole Fellah gets the Caesar salad wrap regularly. Multiple Hollywood types told me it’s a favorite in writers rooms, too.

I admit I was hugely skeptical until I tried the brand’s gluten-free (like everything at Goop Kitchen) pepperoni pizza, named after Paltrow’s Pepper Potts character in the Marvel films. When I visited the test kitchen last summer, chefs Kim Floresca and Brent Parrino prepared a fantastic turkey burger. Though the idea of “clean” food annoys me, I appreciate well-sourced and consistently delivered fare that won’t weigh you down. And the food is fairly affordable (like the $17 Andrew Huberman-collab turkey chili or $23 whole square pizza), unlike Goop’s luxury clothing and goods.

Celebrity-branded food businesses are nothing new. But with Goop Kitchen’s expansion earlier this year to San Francisco and now to New York City, Goop Kitchen feels bound to enter a broader national conversation, as Erewhon did when it went national.  

I asked Paltrow about all of it last week. We chatted about her intentions for the NYC expansion, her involvement in menu development, and the brand’s future.

Matthew Kang: Do you like the same items on the Goop Kitchen menu as your customers? 

Gwyneth Paltrow: Nothing gets on the menu without me loving it. My favorite is the salmon bento box ($18), which is popular but not the No. 1 [among customers]. I also really love the winter harvest chop salad ($16.50) that we do with sharp cheddar and falafel bites; it’s not in the top five [among customers], but definitely one of my favorites.

How much are you guiding menu development? 

I’m very involved in ideating all of the dishes. We do multiple tastings. There’s pretty much nothing on the menu that I haven’t had a direct hand in shaping.

This whole thing is my brainchild. It comes from my cookbooks and years of feeding my family. I really wanted to do something the way that I cook, which I think is full of a lot of flavor, and also very clean and healthy. It’s an area that I think has been lacking. 

Why expand Goop Kitchen to SF and NYC? 

When it started, in our own backyard in Santa Monica, the idea was to bring incredibly high-quality, delicious food to everybody. SF was the next step for us because you don’t have to hire an entirely new team; [you can use the] same operational resources in California. It’s obviously a concept that feels very intuitively California. I was interested to see how it would go down in SF, probably the most urban environment in California. We’re still throttling demand there every day. 

I’m from here [New York], and all my friends and family were about to kill me if we didn’t open Goop Kitchen in New York. It’s really become a thing: People land in California and text me their order; next question is when is this coming to New York. I think it’s thrilling. It’s a homecoming in a certain sense for me. 

In expanding to the East Coast, are you changing the menu at all? Or do you think New Yorkers will gravitate towards different dishes than Californians?

We’re not changing the menu. I think we will probably be open to doing fun things along the way, like our collab with [podcaster and neuroscientist] Andrew Huberman, which was a huge success for us. Everybody wants to eat the same way: really delicious, high-quality. NYC kind of needs that more than anywhere. I haven’t found anything in New York that solves the problem of what should I order that’s really delicious and healthy.

How many locations do you foresee opening in New York and SF? What other cities do you see expanding to?

We have a robust road map for New York and California. We’re looking at Miami, and I think eventually we’ll be in many more cities.

Where does Goop Kitchen fit into the larger Goop organization in terms of financial performance? Is it a financial leader or more of a passion project?

Goop Kitchen is a complete passion project. Feeding people is my love language and creating access to delicious healthy food is a very deep passion of mine. And luckily the business is incredibly successful. Strong unit economics, metrics, repeat rates — we are leaders in many of these categories when looking at competitors. The metrics are off the charts.

What competitive advantages does Goop Kitchen have over its main competitors?

As everybody knows, as you build a food business, the most difficult thing is to scale and maintain the integrity of the food. That’s really the thing to focus on. We developed this business to be takeout and delivery, and engineered the package, like the bento box, to make sure food holds its integrity. We are absolutely obsessed with quality and execution. Once the recipe development is done, and we all feel good about what we’re serving, the operational team is really the most important thing. 

Are there any cuisines or trends you think might influence where Goop Kitchen goes from here?

I don’t see us as a very trend-oriented business. We have found success creating food that follows a certain set of values: food we want to eat and feed our families. We want it to be broadly accessible, especially to people with dietary restrictions. I’m very proud of that.  

Dining out in Big Sur, California, requires intentionality. There’s nothing casual about visiting a restaurant off the cliff-hugging stretch of Highway 1, a place once described to me as “California’s Delphi.” The coastal community has long been a place of artistic and culinary pilgrimage, for folks in search of Big Sur Bakery scones (here’s hoping for a return), a golden hour drink at Nepenthe, and, of course, a meal at the storybook restaurant at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn. For almost 80 years, Deetjen’s has been serving diners heaps of charm alongside its famous buttermilk pancakes and beef ragu; the redwood building feels like a rustic tchotchke- and art-filled English tavern, where each ceramic jester, rabbit, or antique teapot has a heartbeat. So when a painting was allegedly stolen from the restaurant last fall, it hit a central nerve for not just the restaurant, but an even broader community of Deetjen’s lovers. Immediately, an informal, grassroots search and rescue campaign began on Instagram, as users shared their own photos of the painting in a quest to help track it down. 

The painting in question was gifted to the Inn’s late founder Helmuth Deetjen by the late, celebrated local artist George Choley. As Deetjen’s archivist and historian Michelle Provost tells Eater, “This particular Choley [painting] had been in the same place [since the 1980s], undisturbed, and a symbol of continued historic preservation.” 

It wasn’t just decor. It was a part of what she says gives repeat guests a sense of comfort upon entering the restaurant and “a feeling of coming home.” 

Restaurants need art to cultivate a lived-in, meaningful environment. A painting can carry weight as a standalone piece, but in the context of a restaurant, it enhances the connection between the diner and the establishment. Often, as was the case with Deetjen’s Choley, these artworks serve as literal landscapes into which guests can mentally return long after leaving; a visual shorthand for the restaurant’s history and quirks. 

I spoke to a handful of restaurants from across the United States about their signature artworks, asking them about the stories behind their ambiance-making pieces. Some could easily fetch big numbers at a Sotheby’s auction, while others reflect a more folksy, homegrown approach; some are carved, some are painted, and all are proudly made by humans.

The tapestry bringing the Mediterranean to March (Houston)

When March opened in 2021, the 28-seat Houston restaurant received a lot of attention for its hyper-regional menu, which shifts its focus every five-to-six months to a different area of the Mediterranean. The wall-to-ceiling tapestry in the Michelin-starred restaurant has become just as memorable.June Rodil, the CEO of the restaurant group behind March, tells Eater that it “is rooted in the study of the Mediterranean, not only in cuisine, but in landscape, history, climate, and the way people live in conversation with the land.” The massive artwork, (titled As Above, So Below), was commissioned from Argentinian textile artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, whose tufted, textured works, Rodil says, pack emotional depth. Initially concerned about where such a tactile piece would go, they kept returning to the softness and intimacy of placing the piece largely overhead diners. As Rodil says, “We were basically like, no, this cannot live where chairs and heels, dropped forks, [and] jovial splashes of wine are going to have their way with it.” The result is a work that she says feels “responsive, generous, and alive” — ideal for the space’s intimate, history-informed identity.

The hand-carved bar at The Madonna Inn (San Luis Obispo, California)

The queen of America’s kitsch roadside hotels is the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California. The interiors of the midcentury modern hotel favor hot pink, glitter, and floral carpets, and the sprawling Silver Bar Cocktail Lounge and Gold Rush Diner are united by a series of intricate wood carvings of grapes and vines. hey were commissioned by the late founder Alex Madonna from an artisan named Alexander Zeller, a Bavarian woodworker from Munich lovingly known as “Mr. Chips,” who drew inspiration from European design traditions. The archways feature intricate scrollwork, floral patterns, and ornamental details that create a richly textured, old-world atmosphere. As the Inn tells Eater, portions of Mr. Chips’ carvings were intentionally left unfinished after his passing in 1961 as a tribute to him, preserving his original outlines, and adding “a meaningful historical layer to the space, allowing guests to experience not only the artistry itself but also the story behind it.”

The jazzy sandwich and salad art at South Coast Deli (Santa Barbara, California)

For more than 30 years, South Coast Deli has been one of the best places to grab a salad or sandwich (you can’t go wrong with the Eggplant Sammie) in Santa Barbara, California. The casual space has a Factory Pomo-meets-Global Village Coffeehouse aesthetic that sparks ’90s/aughts nostalgia, and an especially memorable painting at its San Roque neighborhood location of a woman riding a carrot in a salad bowl between two figures, a man and a woman, with the latter downing a sub. As owner Jim St. John tells Eater, it was commissioned from a friend and artist named Lloyd Dallett, who cites layered colors, rich textures, “and flavors of butter, cheese, baguettes, and beautiful old stone walls” as inspiration in her art. “[That] piece [was] originally commissioned for our Isla Vista location,” St. John tells Eater, where it hung for a decade before they decided not to renew the lease there. “We like to support local artists, and the pieces we commissioned over the years have tremendous personality and reflect the energy and whimsy associated with South Coast Deli.”

The Ballad of the Dish and the Spoon at Chez Nous (Manhattan, New York)

You would need some serious construction equipment to remove the signature artwork at Chez Nous in Manhattan, New York, as it was painted directly onto the French restaurant’s wall by celebrated British artist Cecily Brown. Titled The Ballad of the Dish and the Spoon, the artwork is a one-of-a-kind mural that runs the length of the space and complements Chez Nous’ mirrored, coffered ceilings, rich dark wood dining tables, and maroon velvet banquettes. As the restaurant tells Eater, “[It’s] inspired by the famous Mother Goose nursery rhyme, and there are many images and hidden references to the rhyme in the painting.” It’s a unique opportunity to dine beside a museum-worthy work, and it finds extra meaning as a piece that lives in the West Village, where Brown first supported herself through waitressing  when she moved to New York City in the 1990s. 

A pizza parlor’s homage to Brokeback Mountain at Roberta’s (Brooklyn, New York)

When famed Brooklyn pizzeria Roberta’s opened nearly 20 years ago, its Bee Sting Pizza helped put Bushwick on the food tourism map. The Italian-American restaurant is still a must for folks on the NYC pizza crawl, and, as any elder Bushwickian will tell you, dining at Roberta’s original string-light-covered converted factory still serves peak Girls-era Brooklyn charm. Holding court in the first dining room, you’ll find a painting that co-founder and owner Brandon Hoy tells Eater still sparks a lot of commentary from guests: an homage to Brokeback Mountain in pizza form. In lieu of realistic depictions of the 2005 film’s stars, it features a pizza-faced Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. “People really love it,” Hoy tells Eater, explaining that the artist, Zachary Kinsella, was an early regular; “He worked with Chris Parachini and myself at Royal Oak before we opened Roberta’s.” Hoy also notes that Kinsella made multiple drawings for Roberta’s in that series, including an unfinished, classic scene from Dirty Dancing. “[Kinsella] was doing a bunch of movies and tv shows,” he concludes, “Not really sure how he landed on Brokeback Mountain [for us], but it’s legendary.”

At a time when so many restaurants are using AI to churn out everything from murals to logos, it feels especially timely to remind ourselves about why the state of a restaurant’s art can be one of its most viable signs of life. Real food, like real art (and not even particularly clouty or critically-acclaimed art) will always be imbued with the efforts of an authentic, human-led creative process. And isn’t there something delicious about that? 

The largest city in North America, Mexico City is a unique, elastic, ever-changing patchwork of food traditions. As a native of the city and a food writer covering the scene for the past 14 years, I’m still amazed by CDMX’s captivating energy and scale.

Since Eater first started reporting on Mexico City’s dining scene in 2016, the way people travel and dine out has changed. Food-obsessed travelers visiting CDMX are often guided by opaque and controversial award systems, such as the 50 Best and, since 2024, the Michelin Guide. But there’s a lot more going on in restaurants here. I’ve witnessed CDMX’s growing openness to regional cuisines and its fascination with trends. I’ve also watched as the chefs who launched Mexico City onto the international stage more than 20 years ago have begun quietly passing the baton to a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs, who have traveled the world, worked in the best kitchens, and returned home to continue their cooking journeys. 

In the spirit of sorting out what is worth visiting, this list includes 38 restaurants and experiences for first-time and seasoned diners in Mexico City, focusing on projects that have distinctive culinary point of views, clear commitments to hospitality, and/or young local talent in the kitchen. 

We update this list regularly to make sure it reflects the ever-changing Mexico City dining scene. Our write-ups include insider tips from our experienced writers and editors, as well as a rough range of pricing for each destination — ranging from $ for quick, inexpensive meals with dishes largely under $10 (or the equivalent in pesos), to $$$$ for places where entrees exceed $30.

New to the map in April 2026: With summer just around the corner, the new additions to the list energize Mexico City’s dining scene, especially in Roma Norte. Leading the latest wave is Lotti, a newcomer with meticulous cooking in an elegant location. Cursi stands out for its vibey and eclectic setting along with a menu of juicy steaks and classic sides. La Vista seamlessly joins the constellation of hi-fi bars in the city, as Mexico City’s hospitality industry continues to refine and reinforce successful concepts. And Taller de Ostiones by FISM is a haven for pescatarians, with some of the best seafood platters in town.

If you’re looking for even more travel tips, order the Eater Guide to Mexico City, which unpacks the sprawling city by breaking it down into seven chapters, along with histories and glossaries that put the tamales and pozoles you’re eating into eye-opening (and mouth-watering) context.

In this episode of Plateworthy, host Nyesha Arrington makes her way through some of the best bites in San Francisco. First stop on the eating tour: Breakfast Little, owned by Andrew Perez and known for its Mission-style burritos. The tater tot-filled OG breakfast burrito has balanced bites of bacon, creamy avocado, and plenty of spice.

Next, Arrington stops at Sōhn for a galbi patty melt. Chef and owner Deuki Hong preps every aspect of the sandwich, including a square-shaped beef patty, kimchi-style slaw, melted cheddar, and a sweet and salty galbi sauce, all between a sesame-crusted croissant bun. Arrington pairs it with a banana oat milk latte and popcorn chicken skewered with tteokboki, before enjoying in Sōhn’s art-covered dining room. “This is one of those quintessential mashups that actually works,” she announces after her first bit of the patty melt.

Arrington then heads to Sons & Daughters, a cozy fine dining spot with two Michelin stars. Chef Harrison Cheney preps trout for one of the restaurant’s most popular courses. The huge fish from Mount Lassen are cut into filets and each bone is carefully removed with a technique Cheney learned while working at Gastrologik, a famously boundary-pushing restaurant in Stockholm that closed in 2022. The fish is cured overnight before being cut into extremely thin slices that are layered on a sheet pan and left in the freezer overnight. Then they cook down the sauce for the fish dish, layered with shallots, garlic, and lacto-fermented root vegetables along with their two-week-old brine. Arrington helps to smash up currant branches that sit in a neutral oil for about a week, creating a flavorful herb oil for the dish. Egg whites slowly soak into another mixture of herbs, also for the sauce. The leftover trout is mixed with egg yolks, lemon juice, and salt in a food processor to make a mouse that the fish will sit on top of. Finally, Cheney makes the layered dish: the rounds of trout and the mousse at the bottom of a small bowl then topped with the fermented root-vegetable sauce and currant wood oil. Arrington is emotional eating the light dish which showcases Californian produce.

Watch the latest episode of Plateworthy to see Arrington taste a few most-try dishes across San Francisco, from a casual breakfast burrito to a high-end trout dish that take days to prepare.

The Michelin Guide announced today that it will be releasing a Great Lakes edition, which will cover Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh — basically, every major city in the region except Chicago, which is covered by a separate Michelin Guide.

It continues the guide’s partnerships with destination marketing organizations, as Eater’s Matthew Kang recently explained. These organizations pay to gain Michelin consideration, on the grounds that Michelin recognition will help drive tourism to cities and diners to restaurants. “Our chefs and restaurateurs have been building a vibrant food scene for years, and this recognition will help attract new visitors, support local hospitality jobs, and strengthen Pittsburgh’s reputation as an exciting culinary destination for taste driven travelers,” Visit Pittsburgh President and CEO Jerad Bachar said in the statement. The guide clarified that these partnerships have no bearing over which restaurants are selected.

In 1926, the Michelin Guide began awarding stars to restaurants in France. In 2005, it expanded into North America, initially awarding stars in New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago. In recent years, the guide has expanded aggressively across the United States, most recently launching guides in the American South, Boston, Philadelphia, and the Southwest. (The South, Boston, Philadelphia received their first selections in late 2025, while the first selections for the Southwest will be announced later this year.)

According to the press release, Michelin inspectors have already begun scouting cities for the inaugural selections, which will be unveiled next year.

On a personal level, gimbap came first for chef Jihan Lee, with his mom’s gimbap setting the standard. On a professional level, though, gimbap took a backseat to another seaweed-wrapped rice roll: sushi. After training at New York City’s two-Michelin-starred temple of sushi Masa, Lee and his business partners opened the Japanese hand roll bar Nami Nori in 2019. Even though they’d floated the idea of gimbap, also often romanized as kimbap, since day one, it didn’t feel like the right time.

The idea remained in the back of their heads. “As Nami Nori grows, eventually we’ll have a team that’s operating it,” Lee recalls thinking. “Then, we can really think about the concept of gimbap, because it’s still something very new to the [rest of the] world.” He wanted to make sure they could do it right, with restaurant business expertise behind them and the trust of diners. In mid-March — with Nami Nori now established enough to have expanded into Florida, New Jersey, and Virginia — Lee unveiled TBD Gimbap in Manhattan’s West Village, where he serves only gimbap. “No soy sauce required,” reads a sign in the space.

With more typical fillings like beef bulgogi and spicy carrots, but also a forthcoming slate of specials that draw on his Japanese training, Lee hopes to push the concept — and test the waters — of what constitutes gimbap. TBD, as its name might suggest, is technically a pop-up; Lee expects it’ll be open until at least May. Lee and his partners in Launchpad Hospitality are sussing out the market; of course diners wanted sushi, but now, how much do they want gimbap? 

It’s not the first dedicated gimbap restaurant in the city; it follows in the footsteps of places like Kimbap Lab, which launched in NYC in 2014. And in March, Kim’s Kimbap also opened as the first United States outpost of a chain that’s operated in Korea since 1992, serving made-to-order rolls filled with ingredients like chicken tenders and spicy pork, though the rolls have been upsized into burrito-like portions for the American audience. The global boom of Korean culture made it the right time to expand to NYC, according to store owner John Kim. “K-food has more recognition than before: People can distinguish gimbap from sushi,” he says. “It’s an opportunity.” Even frozen gimbap is on the come-up: At Trader Joe’s, gimbap is a hot item every time it returns to the freezer shelves, thanks to TikTok fame.

By virtue of its appearance and its general format, gimbap has often been described in Western media as “Korea’s sushi.” Yes, at a glance, there are ingredients swaddled in short-grain rice and then rolled in a sheath of seaweed. Still, some might call this a lazy comparison, one that disregards the nuance in technique and expectations between the two dishes, as well as the cultural differences between Japan and Korea. (The question of which dish came first remains a tenuous one.) Now, with Korean cuisine having attained more stature globally, some chefs are advocating for a better understanding of gimbap, one that lets the dish stand on its own without comparison. (Even Trader Joe’s disaggregates the two.) “I just want to show that gimbap is different,” Lee says.

What makes good gimbap is variety. If sushi emphasizes the simplicity of rice and seasoned fish, gimbap explores the harmony of more ingredients, though these inclusions vary depending on the maker. For this reason, gimbap can be laborious. “I always want it to have something salty, something crunchy, and something in between,” says Jihee Kim, the chef and owner of Los Angeles’s Perilla, which she describes as a “reimagination” of Korean banchan through California produce. “I’m looking for textures: something crunchy, something fresh, and some pickled stuff for flavor,” she says, adding that the avocado in hers is more of a “California thing.” 

In an attempt to dissuade customers from dipping her gimbap in soy sauce — she doesn’t think it fits with the way the fillings are seasoned — Jihee Kim serves it with a hot mustard sauce, though that’s a bit of a concession, too. “Some people, especially Americans, are looking for a lot of sauces,” she says. Perhaps more than sushi, gimbap is like a sandwich. At least, that’s how she associates it: as synonymous with childhood picnics as sandwiches and field trips might be to others, and with a similar level of variety.

For some people, the complicated relationship between Japan and Korea can make the comparisons between gimbap and sushi more frustrating. “When you take into account the history of Japan colonizing Korea — and having taken a lot from Korea, and absorbing it into its own culture — this idea of Korea constantly being subsumed by Japaneseness is pretty fraught and kind of tense,” says culture writer Giaae Kwon. Kwon has written significantly about gimbap, including a 2021 piece titled “Kimbap, Never ‘Korean Sushi,’” in which she describes gimbap as one of the “quintessentially nostalgic foods in Korean cuisine.” In recent years, this cultural tendency to juxtapose Korea and Japan has changed slightly as Korean food has increasingly entered the American zeitgeist, Kwon acknowledges.

For Kwon, it was Momofuku’s short-lived NYC restaurant Kawi that reshaped how she thought about gimbap, a dish she’d previously found “uninteresting.” At Kawi, the chef Eunjo Park made Korean food that Eater NY’s former restaurant critic Ryan Sutton described at the time as “stunning,” including gimbap with foie gras, short rib, or omelet and dried anchovy, offered with a side of trout roe and uni. In an email, Kwon described Park as having given gimbap “life” at Kawi. “Because she understands Korean food, she was really able to push boundaries in terms of what we might think of as gimbap,” Kwon says.

Kawi became a pandemic casualty in 2021, though Park continues to share her experiments on Instagram, proving how friendly the format is to experimentation: gimbap with galbi-style mushrooms wrapped in phyllo, then rolled with chives and pickled burdock; gimbap that riffs on Chinese tomato egg, with tomatoes confited in sesame oil; BLT gimbap, crunchy with bacon crumbles; gimbap with pan-fried Jimmy Nardello peppers. 

At Super Peach, the LA restaurant that opened in October, gimbap has been the highest-selling dish on the menu, according to executive chef Nick Picciotto. It is, indeed, a call back to Kawi, where Picciotto also worked. “It’s something that we always wanted to bring back,” he says, though he notes that the gimbap at Kawi was “a little more high-end” than what they’re currently doing at Super Peach. 

Despite the glowing reviews of Kawi’s gimbap, Picciotto recalls some pushback at the idea of selling gimbap for between $30 and $70. “We learned our lesson of the acceptable price that people are willing to pay, depending where our location was,” he says. Super Peach, which is in a mall, takes a more middle-of-the-road approach, with gimbap between $19 and $29. The best-sellers are the spicy bluefin tuna gimbap with avocado and crushed rice crackers, and the galbi-glazed beef gimbap with dill pickles and caramelized onions. “I’m really glad to bring that circle back [around] from Kawi,” Picciotto says.

For Lee, the motivation to open TBD somewhat mirrored the motivation behind opening Nami Nori. It made him sad, he says, that his friends and family struggled to eat at Masa, where lunch runs $495 per person. Eventually, what he started to see with Korean food was “like deja vu,” he says, referring to the rise of Korean fine dining in NYC. “I started thinking, Wow, Korean food is becoming unattainable.” 

As much as Lee respected that work, he wanted to make food that people could eat once or twice a week. “I thought gimbap was the perfect business for that,” he says.

This excerpt was originally published in Pre Shift, our newsletter for the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more interviews, advice, and first-person perspectives.

Dinner Party, presented by Capital One, is a yearlong series celebrating some of 2026’s most exciting new restaurants. Throughout the year, we’ll check in with teams in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. to hear what it’s really like behind the scenes of a buzzy opening. Read along for their challenges, candid reflections, and advice.

On cocktail menus across the country, it’s no longer rare to see a drink with premium spirits inching closer and closer to $30. Even at some neighborhood joints, $20 classics have become the norm. But when The Radicle, from the team behind Daisies, debuted in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood last year, the cocktail menu had a jaw-dropping price tag: Just $10 for most of the drinks, with a few additions that go for $12. At a time when margins are tighter than ever and restaurants are struggling to keep the lights on, Nicole Yarovinsky, the bar’s beverage director, explained how they keep prices so low and still turn a profit.

Liz Provencher: Was keeping drink prices low baked into the concept when your team decided to open Radicle?
Nicole Yarovinsky: Yes. I remember during service at Daisies, our sister restaurant, chef and owner Joe Frillman pulled me into the office and he pulled out a menu for a new concept with a price tag of $10 written on a tiny little beverage section in the very corner. He goes, “Oh, don’t even look at the price, but if you could get it that low, that would be awesome.”

So I sat down with costing spreadsheets that I’ve been using for years, and I first looked at all of the cocktails that we had within the last year at Daisies. I said I can get most of this down to $10 within a comfortable cost range. We just have to understand the pour cost (which is the percentage of a drink’s revenue that is spent on its ingredients). Our target pour cost of 18 percent needs to be raised a little bit to 22 percent, which is still perfectly acceptable in the industry. It’s such a small change that could affect the scale of drinks being ordered significantly.

Why was making the bar affordable important to you and the team?
When Joe [Frillman] came to me with that menu, he said, “I went out the other night, and I ended up spending $600 on a two-person meal. Most of it was wine, and I left hungry.” We’ve all had that experience. 

We keep talking as an industry about people drinking less, especially younger people. But they can’t afford it. If you’re charging $20 for a single beverage and you’re upset that a 21-year-old is instead going next door to have a seltzer in a can, that’s on you because you’ve completely priced them out. 

Let’s break it down. What do the margins for each drink on the menu actually look like?
I can give you a really great example. It’s called the Rule of Three, a stirred Scotch cocktail. We use Monkey Shoulder, which is a fairly well-respected bottle. A 750 milliliter bottle costs me $23.50. Then we use Cocchi Americano, which, again, is a recognized brand for aromatized wine and goes for $18.17 per bottle. Diplomático Reserva, which is $34 for a liter bottle, and amontillado sherry, which is $17.93 a bottle, round out the major spirit ingredients. Then we use Peychaud’s bitters, which cost me $6.32, and a homemade fig leaf cordial.

The cordial uses fig leaves that we got over the summer from a local Illinois farmer. We processed, pre-measured, and froze the amount to make enough for a batch of cordial. Now we pull these prepackaged kits out of the freezer to make what is essentially a fig leaf tea. A liter of that cordial costs me $6 and we only use a very small amount per drink.

So for this 3-ounce cocktail, all of those ingredients together is less than $2. It comes down to $1.91 for me to make that drink. Since it’s served up, I don’t have to account for the ice that I’m purchasing. I don’t really account for glassware in this space because with the amount of uses I get out of the glass, it’s just silly to take into account per drink, but most people leave a little bit of wiggle room in their pour cost to account for these extra expenses. If I price this cocktail at $10, my pour cost percentage is 19 percent so I’m still under 22 percent, which is our goal at Radicle.

Do you “offset” the cost of some drinks with others?
Yes, of course. Anyone who really sits down with their menu when they’re building it out and looks at these things will definitely have a little bit of offset.

Daisies is known for its commitment to sustainability, and that’s a goal at Radicle as well. How does that play into your ability to keep costs down?
We learned a long time ago at Daisies we have to do things in-house to offset the cost of local and organic ingredients. We also try to maximize each ingredient’s flavor by using fermentation, preservation, and other strategies, and that alone has allowed us to make sure the drinks we’re creating are consistent and cost-efficient. 

Sustainability has been made into something that’s considered luxury—even though all it is at its core is resourcefulness. We realized that by utilizing these more sustainability-oriented thought processes, we didn’t have to really charge more than $15 for a drink while still using [quality] spirits. It is legitimately cheaper to do these things right. Not just the produce that you bring in and the suppliers that you work with, but how you think about these items, how you think about your staff, and the relationships that you build. 

With lower cocktail prices, check averages must be lower. How did staff react to that? And what do you do to supplement that and ensure they still earn a good living?
That’s not something we were blind to, and we made decisions with that in mind when building the concept.

The hourly that we offer is on the higher end of the city, from my understanding. We also have a 20 percent service charge on every single bill. A portion goes toward health and benefits for the staff and the rest is split out between staff in a pool. We have been very transparent with every single staff member that we interview about the menu pricing, and always tell them the service charge is a baseline guarantee. 

Having a pooled house also helps. This is a smaller space, so it requires fewer individuals in the pool. The team is tighter and more incentivized to help each other out. Ultimately, this is a community effort. It’s a machine, and a few hands go a long way.

What has been the biggest surprise since introducing this lower price menu?
A lot of guests come in unaware that affordability is one of the goals we have, so they’re surprised. Our team will ask if they’d like another, and [decline] because they’re used to a cocktail being a particular price point in the city, and they’ve been burned enough times by the final bill that comes.

Bringing the price tag down to a more approachable point actually allows us to do more out-there things. Making sure that [drinks are] not priced at a ridiculous number [means] it doesn’t feel like a risk, so more guests are willing to go for it and order something outside their comfort zone.

We also see a little bit more engagement from the guests. I think with the lower price point, suddenly it becomes more of an open conversation. If you’re putting dual-fermented grapefruit in a drink and the guest has no clue what “dual-fermented” means, they may feel silly asking because they don’t want to be ridiculed for not knowing. But it’s $10, so they’re going to go ahead and order it anyway. Then when it’s delicious, they may feel more comfortable with the person who’s serving them. It feels like they’re not being snobby, they’re excited to talk about it. Maybe they even ask a couple more questions and the team can point them in the direction of new horizons that the guests haven’t even thought about before. 

How can other bars adopt this same approach?
It’s silly that people look at these things and think that they are unattainable. I would love to see a lot less of that. 

A lot of drinks cost $2 to make. Now, how does that $2 suddenly become 20 by the time that it reaches you at the bar? It’s crazy, and I think there’s a very big conversation around transparency that needs to happen in this industry. I’m happy to share our margins and how we make it work because I would love for this to be something that is the norm as opposed to a thing to be put on pedestal.

Chef Joe Frillman, known for his work at Michelin-recognized Daises, initially planned to open another restaurant in 2024, but opening a new business rarely goes according to plan. Just a couple years later, The Radicle recently opened its doors in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Frillman walks Eater through the daily grind of operating a brand new restaurant.

Thursdays are reserved for research and development, when Frillman works on ideas for new dishes to add to the menu. He cuts up a whole tuna, building a tuna conserva dish by poaching chunks of the fish in a “tea” full of aromatics. The cuts are moved into an olive oil mixture when the fish is just cooked. Frillman then tests some beans to add to the dish, opening up half a dozen containers of prepped legumes. The tuna is gently flaked, added to beans and cut up vegetables, and then put on top of grilled bread.

Next, he preps a clam pasta dish with fresh pasta and littleneck clams from Massachusetts, switching out the lobster he originally used in the dish. He discusses what they can do to improve the dish, like adding anchovy breadcrumbs, while tasting it with one of his longtime chefs.

Combining classic Italian cooking with Midwestern produce and sensibilities, The Radicle’s strives to be “a radical version of a bar and restaurant, where, while we might have things like chicken wings or mozzarella sticks on a menu, we think we can elevate those things” says Frillman. The name also references the first root to emerge from a seed, a nod to the fact that the restaurant is in the same space where Daisies first started.

Even opening a new restaurant in the same space, with the same layout and kitchen, Frillman says it cost them about a million dollars to change over the concept and decor of the restaurant. An expensive, but necessary, addition were huge pizza ovens that crank out affordable pies, helping with tight margins overall. He wants customers to be able to approach The Radicle in many different ways, whether they want classic small plates at the marble bar, a chill pizza night, or elevated seafood dishes.

Watch the first episode of Now Open to see how Frillman and his team are still improving The Radicle, even after years of work to open the Chicago restaurant.

Putting together a wedding registry is an overwhelming and uncomfortable task, right up there with making the guest list and keeping track of all the deposits. But while you can’t guarantee the happiness of your guests when it comes to the seating arrangement or dinner music, you can rest easy that if your wedding includes the tradition of gift giving, your registry can actually be great, especially when it comes to food-related gifts. 

Whether you already live with your future spouse or are combining lives and furniture for the first time, the registry gives you the opportunity to finally ask for the items you’ve always wanted in your kitchen, dining space, and beyond. Maybe it’s time to replace those hand-me-down wine glasses that never quite matched your aesthetic or settle down with a Vitamix.

The following wedding gifts have stood the test of time for many of our editors. Some are things we still use today. Some have turned into favorites to give to others. There are also a few splurges, because when else would you be wholly comfortable with asking someone to buy you a luxurious postmodern Italian flatware set? More than anything, these items likely won’t get shoved to the back of a cabinet or pop up only during a move or deep-cleaning session. These are things we would ask for if we had to do it — plan a wedding (did we mention that we’ve shortlisted our favorite NYC restaurants in the Eater app for big groups?), put together a registry, argue with family, panic all the time, actually get married — all over again.

Cookware that goes the distance

I often joke about how my descendants will fight over certain items in my will (others, I know, will be fated for Goodwill), and it feels safe to say that this robust cookware set from the Eater x Heritage Steel collaboration will make the list. The Eater team worked with the family-owned cookware manufacturer to create our Platonic ideal of stainless-steel cookware sets; each piece is made out of 5-ply steel and is compatible with every kind of stovetop. No wonder Bon Appétit just crowned the 4-quart sauté pan one of the best on the market.

Eater x Heritage Steel 5-Piece Essentials Set

Where to Buy:

• $379.95 at Heritage Steel

A Dutch oven you’ll want to display

Owning an iconic item like the Le Creuset Dutch oven is a two-step process: 1) Upon receiving it, follow let it live permanently on your stove, and 2) use it all the damn time. Whatever signature color you choose, from red to ganache, know that your Le Creuset will probably be around long enough to witness your marriage’s golden anniversary.

Le Creuset Signature Round Dutch Oven (4 Quart)

Where to Buy:

• $400 at Le Creuset

The best rice cooker (literally) sings

With options to make silky congee, oatmeal, and sushi rice, among staples like white and brown rice, the Japanese-made Zojirushi rice cooker is the Cadillac of rice cookers. The “perfect machine” also sings a cute jingle every time you hit the “cooking” button. (You can turn that feature off, but why would you?)

Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker

Where to Buy:

• $235 $191.99 at Amazon

A set of classic, versatile coupe glasses

Coupes are an essential addition to any chic home glassware collection. (Champagne or daiquiris, anyone?) These Wolcott Optic coupes are sturdy, dishwasher-safe, and just really nice to look at. The price point also means you’ll likely end up with a large enough set to bust out at cocktail parties and other martini-worthy celebrations.

Crate & Barrel Wolcott Optic 7-Oz. Coupe Glass

Where to Buy:

• $14.95 at Crate & Barrel

A sturdy salad spinner

A lightweight Zyliss salad spinner will remain a loyal workhouse of your kitchen for years to come, thanks to its BPA-free plastic, non-slip base, and sturdy pump. It’ll be in your weekly rotation so much that you won’t even bother locking the handle down (another standout feature for easy storage, as it makes it more compact).

Zyliss Swift Dry Salad Spinner

Where to Buy:

• $44.95 at Amazon

KitchenAid is a classic for a reason

No registry is complete without the classic KitchenAid stand mixer. It’s really the gift that keeps on giving (it whips cream, kneads dough, spiralizes produce, and makes pasta if you have the right attachment) and one that people haven’t stopped giving since it became a wedding gift standard in the mid-20th century.

KitchenAid Stand Mixer (4.5 Quart)

Where to Buy:

• $399.99 $299.95 at Amazon
• $399.99 $299.99 at KitchenAid

A stainless steel kettle with presets

This small but mighty electric kettle is a dream, and comparable in function (but way more affordable, price-wise) with Fellow’s gooseneck electric kettle. It includes several presets for temperatures that are ideal for coffee, oolong, green, and white tea, and it has a hot plate-esque function that will keep your water at the desired temperature for an hour.

Cosori Gooseneck Electric Kettle with 5 Variable Presets

Where to Buy:

• $69.99 at Amazon

Who said pantry storage can’t look cool?

You might recognize these modular, stackable storage containers from our guide to shopping for cool food storage containers outside of the Tupperware realm. I think they’d look at home in Pierre Cardin’s iconic Palais Bulle, and I love the fact that both the retro orange lids and the bottoms of the jars are magnetized for more secure pantry storage.

Cliik 3-Pack Magnetic Stackable Kitchen Containers

Where to Buy:

• $59 at Amazon

A chic (yes) compost bin…

… Ok, so technically the Mill team calls it a food recycler. But the eponymous, high-tech Mill bin makes one of the best cases yet for investing in a chic (yes, really) trash can that will pull its weight in your home every single day. The Mill is designed to make composting easy and stench-free, and it will quite literally dry and grind your food — from turkey bones to avocado pits — while you sleep. 

Mill Food Recycler

Where to Buy:

• $999 at Mill

Stay on the grind (aesthetically)

This display-worthy solid granite mortar and pestle will not only take the spotlight on your kitchen counter, it will also make grinding whole spices and herbs the most pleasant part of your cooking process.

Cole & Mason Granite Mortar & Pestle

Where to Buy:

• $114.95 at Williams Sonoma

A solid salt cellar

There’s nothing over-the-top about this salt cellar, which is exactly the reason it makes a very reasonable registry request. It’s easy to use with one hand, tucks neatly into a counter, and goes with just about any kitchen decor.

Crate & Barrel Acacia Salt Cellar

Where to Buy:

• $19.95 at Crate & Barrel

Nothing beats an Escali scale’s precision

Weighing dry ingredients with a scale as gorgeous as the one from Escali almost feels like you’re cheating on all those measuring cups you’ve accumulated over the years. But nothing beats precision. And nothing beats the feeling of not having to wash measuring cups.

Escali Digital Scale

Where to Buy:

• $32.95 at Sur La Table

The small but mighty prep cup

At first thought, they might not be the most exciting thing to ask someone to buy you, but I can attest to how helpful little prep cups are in the kitchen. You can use them to make spice blends, as dip cups, for housing nuts on charcuterie boards, and general mise en place.

Choice 2.5 oz. Stainless Steel Prep Cups (4 Pack)

Where to Buy:

• $13.96 at Webstaurant Store

Status cutlery

If you’re getting a set of flatware for the first time or need a serious upgrade, go big with this 24-piece set designed by Italian architect and industrial designer Achille Castiglioni. This is the same Castiglioni who, with his brother Pier Giacomo, designed the iconic curved Arco floor lamp for Flos in the 1960s.

Alessi Dry Cutlery Set (24-Piece)

Where to Buy:

• $500 at Alessi

A fish spatula isn’t just for fish

In her time giving gifts for weddings and other occasions, editorial director Missy Frederick has found that the fish spatula is something that most people tend to not have, or are happy to receive a second one if they do. And it’s been her pleasure to give them over and over again.

Wüsthof Gourmet Offset Slotted Spatula (6.5-inch)

Where to Buy:

• $65 at Amazon

The unmatched power of a Vitamix

The Vitamix 5200 is a star of any kitchen it enters thanks to its ample 64-oz. container and 2-horsepower motor. As both a food processor and chopper, it’s great for making soup, ice cream, hummus, margaritas, smoothies, pesto, pancake batter, and muffin batter. All that, and it’s incredibly easy to clean: just fill it with a little warm water and dish soap on high for about a minute, and voilà.

Vitamix 5200 Blender

Where to Buy:

• $549.99 $459 at Amazon

A microwave that doubles as an air fryer

Counter space is a precious commodity, which is part of what makes this multi-purpose microwave such a great choice for a couple looking to consolidate their housewares. This sleek Vissani model microwaves, but it also functions as an air fryer and convection oven.

Vissani Microwave Oven in Stainless Steel with Convection and Air Fry

Where to Buy:

• $109 at Home Depot