“The goal was always to have a restaurant in the Fillmore,” Fernay McPherson says. During six years cooking soul food in an Emeryville, California, food hall, the chef’s sights were set on returning to the historic San Francisco neighborhood three generations of her family have called home. After searching for months, a storefront became available on Fillmore Street. “When I walked into the space, it just felt like I finally made it home,” McPherson says. Some diners who show up for squares of brown butter cornbread and Friday-only fried fish have known the chef since she walked this street on her way to school. Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement, one of this year’s Best New Restaurants, fits into its neighborhood like a missing puzzle piece.
Jhonny Reyes was compelled by a similar pull toward home when he opened Lenox in Seattle. In a restaurant decorated with Puerto Rican coqui frogs and tropical plants, the chef transforms the bounty of the Pacific Northwest into dishes tracing his family’s path from San Juan to New York City to Seattle, where Reyes grew up. His crackling and shreddy lechon luxuriates in broth-soaked mustard greens from a nearby farm. “This is me gathering my roots back,” Reyes says, “and trying to reignite the spark that is my culture.” Lenox is the chef’s expression of his connection to this city, a unique melding of influences and ingredients that sings in his hands.
This year’s most ambitious chefs laid themselves bare, their autobiographical storytelling shaping singular restaurants. You’ll feel it at Vinai, where chef Yia Vang imbues his menu with tributes to Hmong culture and tells of his family’s journey from a Thai refugee camp to Minneapolis. And at Avize, an Alpine restaurant in Atlanta that seems purely European until you get to the frog legs tossed in Atlanta’s very own lemon pepper seasoning. It’s an ode to two places, a chef’s way of sharing a story only they can.
An indelible sense of time and place defines the Best New Restaurants of 2025. This list is unranked because each restaurant is worth a visit for its own reason. A meal you won’t experience anywhere else. —Elazar Sontag, restaurant editor
Aaron Bludorn has harnessed Houston’s culinary specificity to create a menu you won’t find at another hotel in America. His restaurant sits in the courtyard of the Hotel Saint Augustine, an airy, modernist space brimming with sagebrush. Bludorn, who spent a decade in New York working at Café Boulud, cleverly disperses Creole and Vietnamese influences throughout his French-inflected menu as nods to the communities that shaped Houston into one of America’s great food cities. For breakfast and lunch, there’s Gulf shrimp in a moat of creamy grits and massive triangles of quiche suspending earthy layers of collard greens. As the sun sets, diners dig into burgers dressed up like banh mi, with pickled daikon, rich duck liver mousse, and a burst of cilantro. Sausage made from Gulf Coast crawfish is served in spicy Creole sauce, a piquant tomato-based mother sauce that intensifies the seafood’s subtle sweetness. What might be a cacophony of notes in less skilled hands blends into a delicious harmony as dinner unfolds. —Sam Stone
