As we look back on a great year of dining, we’re celebrating the best dishes and desserts we ate at new restaurants in 2023. For our list of The 24 Best New Restaurants of 2023, click here.
I’m a chronic menu-checker. By the time I make a reservation, I’ve usually read the menu, clocked dessert, and figured out a game plan. But luckily—despite my best efforts at planning out every detail—most of my favorite meals are still full of surprises.
A few months ago, sitting in the food court where LA’s only Garifuna restaurant is based, I was introduced to hudut. A tender whole fish bathed in coconut milk curry came out of the kitchen in an aluminum tray. It was at once sweet and mellow from simmered coconut milk and tingling with the heat of scotch bonnet pepper. I hadn’t tasted anything quite like it before and haven’t since. And in Portland, OR, a Burmese dish listed in English simply as “large dumpling” proved to be just that, only the single almost-translucent rice dumpling in a pool of chili vinegar was even larger, more supple, and delicious than I could have imagined.
Here’s the thing about a really great restaurant dish: It can wipe away our expectations and refigure our plans, leaving us dreaming about one very big dumpling or a tray of fish. As we charted our way across the country putting together our list of the Best New Restaurants of 2023, these 13 dishes at new restaurants left us delighted, surprised, and very, very full. —Elazar Sontag, restaurant editor
These dishes were eaten throughout 2023, and some may no longer be offered. When in doubt, check a restaurant’s updated menu.
Pig’s Head Lasagna
Heavy Metal Sausage Co., Philadelphia
The first thing you see when chef Pat Alfiero’s pig head lasagna arrives is not noodles or bechamel or tomato sauce, but a wide slice of barely-warm head cheese. Draped over the slab of baked pasta like a porcine tablecloth, that wobbly mosaic of jowl meat and fat feels like a statement: If you thought you were going to be able to close your eyes and pretend you were not eating a dish called Pig’s Head Lasagna, you’ve got another thing coming. Alfiero’s Heavy Metal Sausage Co. (one of BA’s Best New Restaurants of 2023), which operates as a whole animal butcher shop and salumeria by day and hosts ticketed dinner party-esque Trattoria Nights twice a week, is a giddy celebration of nose-to-tail cooking—and this dish may as well be its mascot. Hiding underneath that head cheese are tender sheets of pale pink pasta, nutty with house-milled flour and tangy with pig’s blood, and unctuous layers of sticky pig’s head ragù. In other words: It’s pork in between pork with more pork on top, and it is every bit as delicious as it is clever. —Amiel Stanek, contributing editor