Eats & Treats >>

• Best Bacon
  Karczma
  Bacon has been made in America since colonial times by curing and smoking pork belly. Yanks prefer what the Brits call "streaky bacon"—bacon sliced so that the layers of fat and meat alternate. This year, we've been bombarded with bacon, finding it in the most unexpected places: in salads,... More >>
• Best Banh Mi
  Nhà Tôi
  Banh mi spread like a particularly fatty strain of pig flu this year—and while we may weary of hearing about these Vietnamese sandwiches, we'll never tire of eating them. While first-generation banh mi makers preside over agreeably spartan Chinatown joints in Manhattan and Sunset... More >>
• Best Bone Marrow (1 Comment)
  Minetta Tavern
  Among variety meats, bone marrow—the slimy generative tissue in the hollow interior of long bones—has been neglected by all but the French, who consider it the perfect thing to spread on toast. The popularity of marrow has multiplied in the last year, so that now there are a... More >>
• Best Brunch (1 Comment)
  The Clerkenwell
  The definition of "brunch": Obligatory social occasion for which one must stand in long lines for overpriced eggs on a pre-packaged English muffin. Although it seems so very New York, the mash-up of breakfast and lunch actually originated in England around 1896, when Punch magazine informed... More >>
• Best Ceviche
  Desnuda
  At a traditional ceviche spot, you might not expect the bespectacled cook to haul out his homemade gravity bong, pack a load of Sichuan peppercorns in the bowl, and get his oysters "toasted." But Desnuda is no ordinary restaurant—it offers "new world ceviche," which seems to mean that the... More >>
• Best Cream Puffs
  Beard Papa
  We're a bit creeped out by the visage of Beard Papa, who looks like a refugee from a Long John Silver's ad. The Japanese bakery with that name and mascot first opened in Osaka, where the head baker supposedly had a big, fluffy beard, and decided to make a dessert that would be just as puffy.... More >>
• Best Cupcakes (1 Comment)
  Out of the Kitchen!
  We're the wrong people to ask about cupcakes. Generally, we hate 'em. Spun off like snot from the dripping nose of Sex and the City, the fad started at Magnolia Bakery, which a friend of ours calls "Mongolia Bakery." There, in multiple convection ovens and near-slavery conditions, oppressed... More >>
• Best Dan Dan Noodles
  Grand Sichuan House
  The throbbing heart of Sichuan cuisine, which hit the city during the past year like a ton of ma po bean curd, is the dish known as dan dan noodles. The "dan dan" refers to the shoulder stick on which the mobile noodle vendor hangs his pots of ingredients. Of the many estimable versions in town,... More >>
• Best Duck
  Aldea
  Ducks are sweet, funny little creatures. Too bad the lipid elixir they grow under their skin and in their livers is the most perfect fat known to humankind. This year, duck fat got its proper due in the heart-stopping duck rice at Aldea. The dish is an extravagant take on paella, complete with... More >>
• Best Fish Heads
  Hunan House
  Chinese diners have been appreciating fish heads for years. Not only do they add a pleasing gooey texture to the broth, but the individual parts of the fish face have estimable flavors all their own: The skin on the forehead and chin is crisp and slides off easily, the eyeballs pop when bitten... More >>
• Best Foie Gras
  Bar Boulud
  Despite hectoring by the PETA people and others, foie gras remains one of the city's most popular organs. Foie gras by itself is an over-unctuous thing, a limp gland oozing grease that can barely stand the heat of the skillet before disappearing completely. (If you want a traditional French foie... More >>
• Best Goat
  Scarpetta
  If pork is the other white meat, then goat must be the other brown meat. Like lamb, it is mildly flavored, and sports enough sinew to make chewing fun. While we're inordinately fond of goat rotis scored at Brooklyn places like Ali's Trinidad Roti Shop, the palm this year goes to Scott Conant's... More >>
• Best Grass-Fed Steaks
  United Meat Market
  In this economy, the best grass-fed steak is the one you make yourself. Get your cast-iron skillet scarily hot, sear that sucker, and top it with a pat of butter. Although corn-fed beef has the fatty savor that Americans are accustomed to, grass-fed (and finished) beef is better for the animals... More >>
• Best Grits
  Dirt Candy
  Ballads have been written about cornmeal, the humble ground grain that brings us some of the world's best dishes—arepas, tamales, and polenta among them. In America, we slake the corn kernels and call it hominy grits, and serve it with loads of cheese, or with butter for breakfast, or with... More >>
• Best Hamburgers
  Andy's Seafood and Grill
  We're going to step out of the American hamburger arms race in favor of a burger from another mother. Gua bao is identified on the menu at Andy's Seafood and Grill as a "Taiwanese hamburger." It's actually the mantou-wrapped pork bun that many people might recognize from Momofuku (but it was... More >>
• Best Hand-Pumped Cask Ales
  Water Taxi Beach
  Among beer fanciers, ales that have been cured in casks—from which it has to be pumped by hand at the bar—have been all the rage. These beers are lower in carbonation, but display a richer flavor, after having undergone two fermentations. Though originally British in origin, many of... More >>
• Best Headcheese
  Txikito
  Headcheese, that glorious loaf of Jell-O-like, fatty, and lush pork yielded from a long-boiled pig's head, has been used to good effect all around the city this past year, whether in a high-end, quivering incarnation at Bar Boulud, or as a rich swath of pig tucked into a banh mi in Sunset Park's... More >>
• Best Hot Dogs, Newfangled
  Fatty Crab
  Sure, the Korean hot dogs at NY Hot Dog & Coffee are fab, heaped with kimchee, bulgogi, or both. And we certainly appreciate the mild burn (but we're saving that for the smackdown). We also double-dig the Chang dog at Crif Dogs. But you can further ramp up the dog-burn by copping a "Fatty... More >>
• Best Hot Dogs, Old-Fashioned
  Gray's Papaya
  Sure, we love Nathan's franks, especially if they're consumed by the sea. And we love waggish Crif Dogs, too, especially the bacon-wrapped beauty known as the "spicy redneck." And the chile-onion relish that gets spooned on top of the weenie at Boulevard Franks in Jersey City also makes us... More >>
• Best House-Purified Water
  The Smith
  Spawned by rampant locavorism, fear of plastic bottles, and an eye on the bottom line, fancy restaurants have started purifying and sometimes carbonating New York's beloved tap water. Some ferry it to the table in a carafe, without mentioning that it will appear on your tab at three bucks or... More >>
• Best Indo-Chinese
  Masala 2 Wok
  Indo-Chinese food is the creation of Chinese restaurateurs in India cooking to local tastes—heavy on the chilies, ginger, soy, sugar, and sometimes MSG (not knocking it!), plus lots of frying. It's wildly popular in India, the second-most-eaten restaurant food after Indian cuisine. One of... More >>
• Best Italian Gelato (3 Comments)
  L'Arte del Gelato
  Last year, lines formed four blocks long at the Upper West Side Grom, the Milanese gelato maker. Despite all this enthusiasm, we found the product gritty and not particularly flavorful. Then, a Village Grom opened to near-universal huzzahs, in an area that has become known as the Gelato... More >>
• Best Japanese Pub Fare
  Qoo Robata Bar
  Japanese pubs, collectively known as izakayas, have been popping up all over lately, bringing spirited drinking and a motley crew of snacks wherever they go. At Qoo Robata Bar, the food runs a delicious gamut from restorative rice porridge and onigiri rice balls to grilled yakitori, and includes... More >>
• Best Kati Rolls
  Aamchi Pao
  In Mumbai, they call them frankies, but Kolkata claims the kati roll. The story goes that a street cart vendor named Nizam-Uddin came up with the snack one day, when orders for parathas and spiced beef kebabs came in so fast that there was no time to wash the plates. So he tucked the kebabs into... More >>
• Best Lardo
  Del Posto
  Now that we know that lard is twice as good for you as butter—it has half the saturated fat, pound for pound—we're wondering why so few places bother to serve it. In Italy, it is a ubiquitous part of the salumi menu—as lardo, which is pig fat that has been cured so it becomes... More >>
• Best Local Cheeses
  Saxelby Cheesemongers
  Wanting our cheeses to come from nearby is a modern affectation, but a pleasing one, even if there's no evidence to prove that one's carbon footprint is diminished. There's no question that these cheeses have terroir—that is, they taste like they're from our part of the country. Most come... More >>
• Best Mac-and-Cheese
  The Obama Flavor C & S Food
  Mac-and-cheese is a soul-food staple, along with collard greens and potato salad. Under the name "macaroni pie," the same dish is often a standout at Anglophone Caribbean establishments peddling the cuisine of Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis, St. Vincent, and Grenada. Of course, any number of Southern... More >>
• Best Mackerel
  Café Glechik
  Holy mackerel! Funny that, because of its newly acquired "sustainable" status, mackerel has become one of the most revered of fishes. We can remember when diners, encountering it in East Village Japanese restaurants for the first time, stuck out their tongues and hollered, "Yuck!" Now we're... More >>
• Best Naples-Style Pizza
  Roberta's
  Naples-style pizza is the fad that won't go away. And who can blame us? While New York pizzas were traditionally humongous contraptions scaled to feed several people at once per pie at the lowest possible cost, the Naples version generally feeds a single person, and sometimes none too well.... More >>
• Best Pastrami
  Bussaco
  Everyone knows that the world's best pastrami is found at Katz's (right?), where it's hand-sliced and fatty. The machine-sliced product at Carnegie Deli and Second Avenue Deli can't compare. But what can compare are the products that derive from the weird-ass fad of making pastrami out of other... More >>
• Best Panini (1 Comment)
  Ballaró
  We've come to think of panini as toasted, pressed deli sandwiches, like those you can get at Pax, the scourge of the earth. But "panini" just means "bread" or "rolls"—simply, it's a sandwich of any sort. At Ballaró, temple to the cured pig leg and all the wonderful things that issue... More >>
• Best Penis Pho
  Pho Sure
  The pleasure of a bowl of pho is principally in the broth, which should be aromatic and round, a brew made of beef bones, sweet charred ginger, star anise, and cloves. The pho at Pho Sure—a jokey name predicated on a mispronunciation of the soup, which is actually pronounced... More >>
• Best Pigs' Ears
  Metro Café
  It seems incredible that a pig's ear can be both an excellent dog treat and a human dish of tremendous sophistication, but it's true. The cartilaginous pink flaps must first be braised or boiled to tenderness, at which point they provide a crunchy, slippery, porcine canvas for spices. But the... More >>
• Best Quesadillas
  Brooklyn Flea
  No! Not bar-food quesadillas, which involve two pasty, pre-packaged flour tortillas squished together over a catalog of dodgy fillings, washed down with Bud Light. We're talkin' about the sublime soul-food quesadillas from the south of Mexico, where the masa is freshly formed into a giant... More >>
• Best Ramen
  Rockmeisha
  Humble ramen has attained total celebratory status in the past year, and, truth be told, there's no noodle we'd prefer to suck noisily up. Gone are the cut-rate packets of dried noodles you once scarfed from the bodega at college, and now, restaurants command a premium for this pasta, which had... More >>
• Best Sammys
  Mumbai Xpress
  Between banh mi, mantou buns, and kati rolls, this has been the year of the sandwich—a happy occasion, but, please, let the infantile term "sammy" die. The sandwich that blew our minds this year came from street-food specialist Mumbai Xpress, where the Sichuan paneer sandwich is a... More >>
• Best Sardines
  Asmak Taama
  Once the near-exclusive province of the Spanish, Portuguese, Turks, Japanese, and Greeks, sardines—the fresh kind, not the canned—are becoming gradually more popular, partly because of their sustainability. They also have a mild flavor and an oiliness that allows them to absorb... More >>
• Best Sausages
  DBGB
  Although high runner-up honors go to Wechsler's Currywurst, the truth is that the best sausages of the year, by far, can be found at DBGB, Daniel Boulud's international sausage emporium. It would have been a closer contest if it weren't for DBGB's boudin Basque, which is a meat-product... More >>
• Best Soft-Serve (1 Comment)
  Mister Softee
  Momofuku Milk Bar's pistachio soft-serve's sheer deliciousness nearly knocked us to the ground when we first tasted it, and the bakery has continued to churn out unusual and amazing ice cream, including one flavored with cereal milk. But come on—does the Momofuku empire really need more... More >>
• Best Sustainable Fish
  Harbour
  Seafood sustainability is becoming a major issue in the Restaurant World, with subtle and not-so-subtle agitation on the part of the dining public in favor of more responsible seafood choices among chefs, some of whom think it's morally OK to drain the vitality of the oceans for their own... More >>
• Best Toasted Cheese
  Colandrea New Corner
  Toasted cheese remains the apex of comfort food, a meal or snack that all of us can enjoy, even vegetarians. In spite of many newfangled versions available at bistros, the diner version utilizing puffy white bread and American "cheese" continues to be wonderful at places like Le Bonbonniere, in... More >>