Ten Restaurants That Define American Dining This Winter

It’s not an overstatement to call Rose Previte the queen of D.C. vibes. Her restaurants Compass Rose and Maydan don’t simply tap influences from other parts of the world … they remix them, play with them respectfully, and honor them joyfully. (Consider Compass Rose’s seamless hops from Yemen to Georgia to Mexico, to say nothing of its Sunflower Coach, a tribute to Ukraine and eastern Europe.)

You might hope to enjoy precisely that philosophy in a great bar, and that’s what she has devised with Medina, a follow-on of sorts (“little sister,” in their words) to Maydan. Classic cocktails are in abundance, but the house-created efforts show quintessential Maydanesque touches; think urfa-lime Tajin on the Spice Runner, a banana-fueled mezcal drink. Martinis include garnishes like sumac-pickled onions.  And while the bites lean to bar food — small plates of merguez, beets with tahini and other mezze — a trio of substantial tagines here complete the effect.

The bright line between bar and restaurant feels especially blurry nowadays. Medina has arrived to bridge it perfectly, as we’d expect from Previte.

Chef Brian Bornemann and creative director Leena Culhane, the duo behind this Santa Monica spot, have done their fair share to advance the cause of fresh and locally sourced seafood: They run the pioneering Crudo e Nudo just down the street (and also opened the much-missed Bella Dea in New York’s West Village).

Their approach at Isla follows the same broad strokes as Crudo e Nudo — local sourcing, plus a naturally minded wine selection, plus Santa Monica vibes. But if the other restaurant goes long on raw and lightly cured seafood, the focus here is on the cooked side of the equation for fish and poultry, namely from the wood-fired oven that’s a central fixture of the space. That means tender rockfish with a caper salsa, charred cauliflower with a sweet-chile sofrito, duck breast with black garic, and za’atar-spiced chicken wings — in addition to salads, aguachile, and lots else to round out a meal. It all reveals Bornemann’s nuanced take on California cooking, also reflected in the name: “Isla” indicates a a tribute to coastal ingredients, but also references a longer view of the history of California and Baja, back to Spanish days. 

At a time when it’s candidly hard to pin down just what “California cuisine” means anymore,  this one space on Santa Monica’s Main Street has captured an interpretation that feels entirely, and perfectly, of its time and place.

This thimble-sized space in Brighton is the culmination of Alyssa Mikiko DiPasquale’s long dream to bring sake to a wider audience. It would be impressive enough that Koji Club is Boston’s first sake bar, but more pointedly, DiPasquale has also created a space with just the right sensibilities to decode and demystify a drink with a rapidly growing fan base.  She’s assembled a team of fierce sake lovers, and she herself has deep experience, including at O-Ya, which brought sublime omakase to Boston more than a decade before the current trend.

The sake list here touches all the key elements — new-wave, old-wave, hot, cold, brewed domestically (and in Mexico!) and with a range of Japanese brewers, regions and styles. It is similar in its approach to what Courtney Kaplan has done in L.A. at Ototo, and Austin Power at New York’s Accidental Bar. 

Snacks are modest and umami-driven (Japanese potato salad with crispy leeks) although if you’re feeling a caviar service with potato chips, they’ve got you. It’s the sort of approach that’s making sake ever increasingly a everage of choice among Americans. The only caveat? Plan your visit thoughtfully: With just a handful of seats and less than 300 square feel, a reservation is a very good call.

There’s something about a stellar restaurant as it begins to mature from that opening buzz — a deeper confidence in food and service, and an aesthetic that’s been pressure-tested with time. That’s precisely the phase Place des Fêtes has entered, having opened in spring 2022. And as its sister restaurant, the groundbreaking Oxalis, prepares to close at the end of the year, PdF remains an example of how Steve Wong, Nico Russell, and Piper Kristensen, brought a certain style of dining — fine, but not fancy — to this part of Brooklyn.

While PdF retains its “wine bar” moniker, that never was its full story. It is a wine bar, in that the pours are a key part of service and the plates, in one perspective, are small and snacky.  But that doesn’t quite give credit to Russell’s alchemy of flavors — as in a simple-seeming dish of new potatoes spiked with cured, dried fish and horseradish, that on one hand feels like something in the canon of New British or Mitteleuropan, but is in fact very much its own thing. Or a sardine toast with smoked butter and kosho, which splits the difference between Iberia and Japan. These delights in small packages are good reason to graze, especially with a seat at the bar, although a handful of larger plates, like rigatoni anchored by squash, remind you that you’re more in the realm of modern bistro than quote-unquote wine bar. 

Of course, there is PdF’s wine list — which, despite the restaurant’s name reference to Paris’ Belleville, is largely naturalista Spanish, but also incoudes a spectacular collection of sherries, and standout classic cocktails. (Pro tip: Don’t miss the daiquiri.)

To dine at Leah Chase’s restaurant in Tremé is a rite of passage for the food-serious in New Orleans.  Through the years, dating back to its founding in 1941, Dooky Chase has been not only a benchmark for some of the classics of Creole cooking — gumbo, crawfish etouffée, and of course that fried chicken — but a cultural anchor as well, a place where Black art and politics and activism could come to the table up through Chase’s death in 2020. 

But, as our New Orleans contributor Jyl Benson put it, 2023 “was the year Leah Chase’s descendants lovingly took hold of the legacy she left behind …  and made it their own.” Most specifically that included the work by her grandson Edgar “Dook” Chase IV, trained both in classical European cooking and his grandmother’s own epic work, buffed up some of the menu offerings, without losing sight of what made the restaurant so legendary — dishes like shrimp Clemenceau, which are the very heart of Tremé.

Also, crucially, it’s a bit easier to make a reservation these days, in case you needed a reason to revisit a classic among classics, or to plan a pilgrimage to one of the country’s most iconic restaurants. 

GiGi’s is a quintessential story of continuity in Atlanta. Last year, chefs Eric Brooks and Jacob Armando took over the Gato space, a longtime cafe that in recent years had become home to some of the city’s top pop-ups, including GiGi’s, the chefs’ homage to Italian red-sauce cooking. The space has been a mainstay of the Chandler Park neighborhood for 50 years, so while GiGi’s was ambitious and new, it also had a mandate to keep roots decidedly local.

The result has been a remarkable hybrid — GiGi’s captures Armando and Brook’s ambitious cooking while still feeling very much like the kind of spot you could drop in for a quick drink. (And indeed, many of the seats are set aside for walk-ins.) And this is less red-sauce homage than Italian American cooking as departure point; think polenta bricks topped with trout roe and caviar, campanelle pasta boosted with cabbage and culatello, and, as the menu emphatically states, “no lasagna!” We’re also partial to the DIrty GiGi, their take on a martini, and the sparkling wines on the “reserve” list (which top out at just $60 a bottle). With just a handful of seats to reserve, make Priority Notify your friend here … or just drop by to get on the waiting list, and then grab a drink nearby, or window-shop the storefronts on McLendon Ave.

An even more dramatic example of how a restaurant can keep reinventing itself while still feeling comfortable: Friday Saturday Sunday has been just off Philly’s Rittenhouse Square for some 40 years, “the lone survivor,” as the Inquirer put it, “of Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance of the early ’70s.” And its current owners aren’t exactly new:  Chad and Hanna Williams, alumni of chef Jose Garces’ restaurant empire, bought FSS in 2015, renovated stem to stern, and turned what had been an old reliable into a far more ambitious endeavor. That evolved into a format built around Chad’s evocative tasting menus and Hanna’s keen eye for detail, until the pandemic forced them to shuffle again — and deepened their determination to perfect their expression of great hospitality. 

This was the year, undoubtedly, when it all catalyzed, including the Williamses winning the James Beard award for Outstanding Restaurant. The tasting menus just keep garnering deserved attention, with dishes like a sweet-corn chawanmushi and quail with Jamaican coco bread that hew together Chad’s many influences. It’s deeply personal cooking by way of West Philly. 

There’s also the downstairs bar, where wonderfully quirky and erudite cocktails (the Carte Blanche somehow brings together Angostura bitters, Chartreuse and smoked eggplant) provide a casual counterpoint. When the question comes up as to what fine dining will look like in these eminently casual days, the Williamses have created a perfect response.

Vivian Howard’s Wentworth St. restaurant was a big deal in Charleston when she opened in 2021. Howard was already famous from her PBS series, and an icon of sorts representing the new Southern cooking. But to that point about how restaurants always get better once they’ve been lived in for a while, Lenoir has only gotten better with a couple years’ time.

Howard’s latest menu, unveiled this fall, goes even deeper in her particular interpretation of Southern flavors: The Parmesan stewed butter beans feel like the sort of thing you’d similarly encounter nearby at FIG, which helped define today’s style of Charleston cooking. Pan-roasted chicken with citrus mashed sweet potatoes and a pecan-cranberry relish is what it sounds like: the extension of Carolina Thanksgiving that you were craving. And Howard’s oyster roosters (pork rind below, raw oyster up top, spicy cocktail sauce to make it a party), a staple at her  now-closed Kinston, N.C. restaurant Boiler Room, have been revived a bit further south. 

Cocktails lean to brown liquor, beers tap Charleston’s brewing strengths, and the carrot cake is how you want to finish your evening. And as should be clear, there’s nothing we love more than when a restaurant finds its sweet spot. Lenoir has done just that.

In any city, the menu at Krüs would come across as a gem of locally sourced dishes, with surprising accents (lemongrass oil on the burrata).  But in Miami — or more specifically Coconut Grove — chef Sebastian Vargas’ cooking comes through as an emblem of where the city’s cooking is headed: low-key, locally anchored, and quietly transformative in a place that’s working to affirm its culinary style.

Vargas clearly has a sense for flavors that acknowledge Miami’s bounty in a subtle way: A local and rotating crudo comes with a finger-lime ponzu; the grilled scallions with smoked pimentón nod to several South Florida foodways; coconut rice comes with wild-caught local crab; and the strong pull of Italian cooking comes through in pastas like agnolotti with smoked corn and porcini broth (immediately a staple of the menu).

Krüs is a more eclectic companion to the approach Vargas brought to the wonderful Los Félix. And like its sister restaurant, the wines selected by partner Josh Hackler are naturally inclined, and the design from partner ​​Pili Restrepo Hackler feels somehow both breezy and rustic, a luminous Miami take on driftwood chic. It all adds up to a quintessentially local vibe, in a town that’s still finessing what “local” means.

This Georgetown restaurant proudly wears the Parisian moniker “néobistro” — and while that term has gotten a workout this year on these shores, chef Matt Conroy, executive pastry chef Isabel Coss, and GM Elizabeth Parker have a clear sense of what it actually means. For one thing, it’s about being human-scaled, and rooted to a neighborhood, and Lutèce’s situation in the old Café Bonaparte space provides continuity between D.C.’s historic love of French food and an appreciation of how the cuisine has evolved today. 

The way to go is really via a chef’s tasting menu (four courses for $95) but should you want to choose your own adventure, plates like sweetbreads in sauce américaine with figs, or Parisian gnocchi with oyster mushrooms and white miso show how form and function are evolving in the Gallic world. Same with Coss’ desserts: dishes like a pear millefeuille with parsnip retune some classic forms. 

In a year when French food has rediscovered its cachet, Lutèce is doing a remarkably pure, clear-eyed take on the best of how Paris itself is evolving. Diners in D.C. — and the rest of us — are better for it.