GRUBSTREET
The Absolute Best New Restaurants of 2019
By Adam Platt
As always in the dining capital of the USA, this end-of-decade year produced the usual mob of diverse, compelling, generally delicious restaurants from which to cull our annual, highly debatable “Absolute Best Restaurants of the Year” list. As usual, we focus on the very newest restaurants (sorry, Gotham Bar and Grill) and the ones that opened this year (sorry, Benno and Sushi Noz), and, as usual, we have been forced against our will by our click-happy editors to rank our favorites in descending order. Have we missed a few places during the course of our gastronomic rounds? Yes we have! Will we get to them in due course? Yes we will, but in the meantime, here’s Platt’s 2019 list for your merry debating pleasure.
9. Luthun
432 E. 13th St., nr. Ave. A; 646-454-9484
This smallish (600 square feet), slightly out of the way East Village tasting room hasn’t received much attention among members of the nattering classes, but don’t let that fool you. The chefs, Nahid Ahmed and Arjuna Bull, are veterans of the city’s high-end pop-up scene, not to mention some of the most storied kitchens in the world (Lespinasse, The Fat Duck, El Bulli) and bite for bite, their modestly priced, ($68) Indian-accented “global” menus (one for carnivores, one for vegetarians) offer a whole variety of polished and unexpected treats. To experience the full rainbow of flavors and technique, we recommend forking over an extra 52 bucks for the “chef’s pass” tasting experience which, on my visit, included frizzled slices of razor clams topped with amaranth leaves, nodules of veal touched with a lingonberry sauce leavened with gochujang, and one of the delicately crunchy octopus tentacles rolled in cornstarch and flash fried with a touch of rice flour.
