Most Promising Restaurant Openings of 2018

The popular Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun, based in Charleston, South Carolina, opened its first branded restaurant in Atlanta in May, near SunTrust Park, the Atlanta Braves’ new stadium. The restaurant website promises “elevated cocktails and a modern take on some of our favorite classic Southern dishes.” Pimento cheese sandwiches, oyster po’boy sliders, turkey neck gumbo, and rabbit and dumplings are typical menu items.

The Texas capital’s Franklin Barbecue — “the best BBQ joint in America,” according to Esquire — became a cult destination almost as soon as it opened in 2009, with patrons typically waiting in line for three hours or more for Aaron Franklin’s famous brisket. Tyson Cole’s Uchi, in another part of the city, has consistently won honors for its original take on sushi. The two unlikely partners got together this spring to open Loro, which they say is an “Asian smokehouse and bar.” The brisket here is served with chile gastrique and Thai herbs, with coconut-scented rice available on the side. Oak-grilled snap peas with kimchi emulsion, Thai green curry sausage sandwich, and oak-smoked salmon with cucumber-yuzu broth are among the other choices.

Named for a supposed law prohibiting whaling in the landlocked state of Oklahoma (actually, the statute refers to any threatened wildlife species, but doesn’t mention whales), Whaling in Oklahoma calls itself “a modern American brasserie … focusing on Japanese flavors.” Chef Tim Maslow worked for David Chang in New York City, then ran his father’s former Strip-T’s restaurant in Boston and opened the now-defunct Ribelle, which won four stars from The Boston Globe. The menu at his new place ranges from Murasaki sweet potatoes with cultured butter to raw Atlantic halibut with Japanese lime and soy to salt-grilled hamachi with rhubarb.

Having cooked at such top-flight Italian restaurants as Spiaggia in Chicago and A Voce in New York City, Missy Robbins opened her first place, Lilia, in Brooklyn in early 2016. It was a hit, earning Robbins a James Beard best chef nomination and scoring three stars from the New York Times. This fall, Robins launched another Brooklyn restaurant, Misi, in the historic Domino Sugar Refinery. The menu is simple, with just 10 antipasto choices and 10 pastas, all homemade every morning. The only problem with the place, as Gothamist put it, is getting a table.

Five-time James Beard Foundation nominee Erling Wu-Bower was born in Indiana and has cooked in such Chicago institutions as The Publican and Nico Osteria. However, his new place — which Food & Wine calls Chicago’s “most talked-about restaurant of the year” — is California-themed. We-Bower’s Chinese-born mother moved to California when he was in high school, and he cooked with her there (at home), and liked the style of food he found in the state. Back in Chicago, at Pacific Standard Time, he has two wood-burning ovens and sources produce and other ingredients both locally and from the Golden State. Chicken wings with fish sauce; rigatoni with squid, merguez sausage, kale, and rye breadcrumbs; and tempura-fried rockfish are among the offerings.

James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd closed his celebrated Underbelly — which the Houston Chronicle describes as “the restaurant that redefined how Houston ate” — in March. (He told Paper City Magazine that he had “started thinking that there were too many [self-imposed] regulations on our food” — like his insistence on sourcing the majority of ingredients from within a 150-mile radius — and he wanted to have a place with “a wider pool of options.”) In October, Shepherd opened Georgia James in the old Underbelly space, styled on its website as his “unconventional” take on a steakhouse. Appetizers include such unusual choices as bacon, sausage, and hash browns with a cured farm egg and beef tartare with fish sauce aïoli and shrimp crackers. In addition to a variety of steaks, Shepherd serves main dishes like wood-fired redfish with gulf shrimp and barbacoa-style short ribs.

Following the success of their restaurants inside NoMad hotels in New York City and Los Angeles, chef Daniel Humm and restaurateur Will Guidara — also proprietors of New York’s 11 Madison Park (which has three Michelin stars and was named “The World’s Best Restaurant” in 2017) — opened this luxury-restaurant-heavy city in October. The menu is Vegas-extravagant, including lobster Thermidor, a 14-ounce tomahawk veal chop, and the famous NoMad roast chicken, stuffed with foie gras and black truffles. The dining room is framed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves housing part of late billionaire philanthropist David Rockefeller’s 25,000-volume library.

Middle Eastern food, Israeli and otherwise, is hot right now, from quick-service chains to sit-down restaurants. L.A.’s Bavel, which opened in the city’s Arts District in April by the proprietors of the highly regarded Italian place Bestia, takes inspiration from Israel, Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt. The food, crafted by owner-chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis, improvises on tradition, with dishes like hummus topped with duck ‘nduja (a spicy, spreadable pork sausage originally from Calabria, Italy), a creamy pâté combining foie gras and puréed dates, and slow-roasted lamb-neck shawarma with tahini, pickled vegetables, and homemade laffa bread.

Influential Korean-American chef David Chang, whose Momofuku and other New York restaurants have inspired countless other young chefs, tackled Los Angeles in January with his first California establishment, the warehouse-scale Majordōmo. As with many of Chang restaurants, reservations are tough to get, but those who persevere will encounter not an echo of the Momofuku menu but such choices as pork neck with spicy pineapple, Santa Barbara uni with tofu and yuzu, and boiled whole chicken with black truffles and hand-torn noodles.

Hiden is hidden at the back of a chain taco joint called Taco Stand in Miami’s trendy Wynwood neighborhood. It only has eight seats, at a bar behind which chef Tadashi Shiraishi and an assistant serve a nightly omakase (“chef’s choice”) $150 menu that typically includes sashimi, sushi, a soup, a hot entree, and a light dessert. It’s reservation only, through the Tock reservation service, and diners are given an entry code to pass in from the taco place. This hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the city’s hottest new restaurants.

Chef Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York City are regularly ranked among the best fine-dining establishments in the country (each has three Michelin stars), has gone in a different direction with his latest restaurant: backwards. That is, his new restaurant at the historic Surf Club in the Miami suburb of Surfside, recently revivified as a Four Seasons Hotel, is designed in decor and menu to evoke, as Keller told Haute Living, “the effortless, easygoing Golden Era of the ’50s and ’60s.” That means formal but not stuffy tableside service and a menu that includes such old-style “continental” dishes as oysters Rockefeller, Dover sole meurière, and prime beef short rib Wellington.

Christina Nguyen and her partner, Birk Grudem, first got the attention of the Minneapolis food community with their Latin-American-accented food truck, Hola Arepa, which evolved into a bricks-and-mortar restaurant. For their second place, they drew on Nguyen’s Vietnamese heritage and Grudem’s travels in Southeast Asia. The menu ranges from interpretations of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino dishes to such mashups as laksa shrimp and grits and Thai fried chicken and biscuits. Eater dubbed Hai Hai one of the best new restaurants of the year.

According to Nashville Scene, this “anticipated eatery shows great promise with an elegant offering of seasonal fare.” Chef John Stockton is a veteran of the acclaimed

Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee, about 180 miles northwest of Nashville. The restaurant occupies the brick-and-old-wood interior of an old blacksmith shop, opened in 1886 by German immigrant John Geist. Nashville Scene critic Chris Chamberlain describes Stockton’s dishes (which include cavatelli with winter squash and kale and seared scallops with cauliflower and almond brown butter) as elegant, but “focused on bold flavors and earthy comfort food classics.”

On March 14 this year, Nina Compton, chef-proprietor of NOLA’s highly regarded Compère Lapin, was nominated for a James Beard Award in the Best Chef: South category. The next day, she opened her highly anticipated new place, in partnership with her husband and her former Compére Lapin sous-chef, in a former rice mill in the city’s Bywater neighborhood. (She went on to win the Beard Award in May.) The fare includes pickled shrimp with celery and trout roe, jerk chicken rice with butter beans, and mustard-crusted mahi mahi with sauerkraut and turnips.

Israeli-born, Philadelphia-bred chef Alon Shaya partnered with New Orleans chef John Besh in three restaurants — Shaya, Domenica, and Pizza Domenica. In October of last year, after the Times-Picayune broke a story revealing that 25 female former employees of Besh’s restaurants had accused Besh or his staff of sexual harassment, Shaya was fired, apparently for having spoken out about the issue. A subsequent settlement banned Shaya from using his own name in another restaurant. Instead, he opened Saba (the name means “grandfather” in Hebrew), in the space recently vacated by the lamented Kenton’s. Pita cooked in a wood-burning oven and skewers (of lamb, octopus, foie gras, squash) grilled over charcoal feature on the menu, and Shaya’s famous homemade hummus comes with various toppings, including blue crab, lamb tongue, or Brussels sprouts.

Former New York Times restaurant critic and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl called a dinner she had at this non-traditional Korean newcomer in June “the most provocative and exciting meal I’ve had in a very long time.” The tasting menu, which includes presentations and ingredients that aren’t immediately thought of as Korean (for instance, scallops and green tomato in fig vinegar) is served with hand-crafted ceramic plates, bowls, and chopsticks in minimalist surroundings. Atomix is part of the wave of contemporary Korean places that have been appearing in New York City, both casual and high-end, among them the same proprietors’ Atoboy and such other restaurants as Soogil, Hanjan, Oiji, and Jungsik.

“Nyum bai” means “eat rice” — or, more broadly, “let’s eat” — in Cambodian, and the largest section of the menu at Cambodian chef Nite Yun’s new restaurant is headed “With Rice.” Accompaniments to the rice include spicy chicken with lemongrass, blistered eggplant with ground pork and shrimp, and crispy catfish with green mango salad. The East Bay Express dubbed Nyum Bai “poised for national acclaim.”

Opened in October, the eagerly awaited Stir is the first and only restaurant on the East Coast designed by legendary architect Frank Gehry. Operated by Philadelphia’s Starr Catering Group, Stir is the first major completed portion of Gehry’s master plan for the Philadelphia Art Museum. Local-born chef Mark Tropea prepares straightforward American fare, including oysters with finger lime caviar, chopped salad, grilled chicken Cobb sandwich, and pan-roasted Pennsylvania trout. The restaurant is open only for lunch and weekend brunch.

Gabriel Rucker, of the James Beard Award-winning Le Pigeon and the more casual Little Bird Bistro, hailed by Portland Monthly as “the city’s most gifted chef, bar none,” opened his Canard wine bar in April. It has already been garlanded with honors — named Restaurant of the Year by The Oregonian and one of the best new restaurants in America by Eater, among other accolades. The American-French bistro cooking encompasses dishes like pastrami-wrapped veal terrine with blackberry sauerkraut mustard and Bordeaux BBQ lamb shank with smoky lentils, blue cheese, and onion rings. The extensive wine list covers the usual bases, but also offers unusual concentrations of white Loire wines, Spanish whites from Galicia, and seldom-seen whites, rosés, and reds from Greece.

Mexico itself, and the first-rate restaurants of northern Baja California in particular, are just next door, but with border crossings (especially in returning to the U.S,) becoming more problematic all the time, modern Mexican places stateside, like “Top Chef” star Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins new El Jardín, are highly anticipated by San Diegans. Zepeda-Wilkins draws on her food experiences growing up between San Diego, Tijuana, and Guadalajara, serving things like tuna carnitas, a salad inspired by the famous Tijuana-born Caesar salad, and wood-grilled ribeye with heirloom beans and black mole.

“One of the flashiest, most impressive new projects of this year,” according to Food & Wine, Angler, on the city’s Embarcadero waterfront, describes itself as “a sea-life focused restaurant with views of the expansive wood burning hearth as well as of the San Francisco Bay.” Chef Joshua Skenes — whose other restaurant is the pricey Michelin three-star Saison, about a mile to the south — works with local fishermen and an abalone farmer, among other suppliers. His menu concentrates on simple preparations of things like diamond turbot, spot prawns, and Petrale sole, plus the occasional example of non sea-life like antelope tartare or bone-in porterhouse. (Skenes plans to open a second Angler, in Los Angeles.)

Chef Mashama Bailey and business partner John O. Morisano opened The Grey in late 2014, in a former Art Déco Greyhound bus station in this Georgia coastal city. It became one of the South’s most talked-about new restaurants (Eater dubbed it nationwide Restaurant of the Year for 2017/2018). The proprietors describe this new spinoff, which opened in October, as a “Port City Southern lunch counter meets urban market.” Sandwiches and a selection of groceries are offered, and breakfast is served. Simple fare like smoked fish spread, po’boys, rotisserie chicken, and fried fish of the day add up to what the restaurant’s website calls “food that will fill your belly and your soul.”

Erik Bruner-Yang, known in the capital for his ramen-focused Toki Underground and Cambodian-Taiwanese place Maketto, leaves Asia mostly behind with the menu at this new restaurant in the LINE Hotel. True, he serves an uni tray and garnishes his half chicken with wasabi, but tuna crudo, Caesar salad, market fish a la plancha, and a beef short rib burger are more typical of the offerings. Bruner-Yang’s associates in the enterprise include well-known D.C. cocktail specialist Todd Thrasher and pastry chef Pichet Ong, former executive pastry chef for Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

After running restaurants in Mexico City, chef Roberto Santibañez became executive chef at the popular Fonda San Miguel in Austin, then culinary director for the Rosa Mexicano chain in New York City before opening several of his own restaurants there. His foray into Washington, D.C. has been hailed as the city’s best-looking new restaurant by the Washington Post. The tortillas are handmade and the menu includes such unusual choices as crab and shrimp empanadas, chicken mole tacos, and chamorro (crispy pork shank), as well as more expected dishes.

Casey Lane might be the busiest chef in Los Angeles, running the acclaimed Tasting Kitchen in Venice and Breva and Veranda in downtown L.A., as well as Viale dei Romani, which opened in January, in West Hollywood. Food & Wine called in “the country’s most significant Italian seafood restaurant since Marea in New York,” calling out Lane’s crudos, fried rice with clams, and (in the non-seafood department) rabbit pizza.