Wine industry veteran Yannick Benjamin partnered with George Gallego, Oscar Lorenzzi, Mara Rudzinski, and Lorenz Skeeter to open Contento, a welcoming wine bar with a Peruvian-rooted food menu and an eye toward inclusive hospitality and space accessibility. Contento boasts an ambitious range of wines — at varying price points — paired with a menu led by Lorenzzi that has included dishes like octopus with black chimichurri and duck liver mousse with purple corn focaccia. Benjamin and Gallego, who both use wheelchairs, helped design every inch of the dining room with consideration for wheelchair users, including wide aisles, higher tabletops, and lowered bar seating.

Wau — from veteran Laut restaurateur Salil Mehta — debuted on the Upper West Side with a bounty of Southeast Asian comfort food, including claypot golden braised tofu, pineapple fried rice, and murtabak, a Malaysian-Indian savory pancake stuffed with minced chicken and laced with jalapeños. The accompanying bar is stocked with Old Fashioned cocktails touched with banana leaf smoke, and wau-lahs, “a Singaporean version of a piña colada,” as Mehta puts it.

At Kochi, chef Sungchul Shim won over customers with a tasting menu of Korean-style skewers that earned a Michelin star last year. Now, he’s focusing on Korean hand rolls — similar in shape to Japanese temaki; and anchored with some familiar kimbap ingredients — at Mari, a new restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen that opened in the final weeks of 2021. Like Kochi, Mari is also a tasting menu spot. The lineup includes 11 courses for $125 and features hand rolls packed with ingredients like pork belly, snow crab, mackerel, and shrimp.

Chef Hillary Sterling is playing with fire at Ci Siamo, the latest debut from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. Sterling launched the Italian restaurant, located inside Hudson Yards-adjacent development Manhattan West, with housemade pastas, wood-fired trout, dry-aged ribeye steak, and a blistered, caramelized onion torta that has already been turning heads. The dessert program, featuring housemade gelati and sorbettis and a chocolate amaro-filled bomboloni, is overseen by lauded pastry chef Claudia Fleming.

The city’s stage for Thai-inflected diner food expanded last November with the debut of Random Access, a casual new spot from the hit restaurateurs at Hand Hospitality. Crab curry mac and cheese, mussel chowder, and fried chicken with coconut milk waffles share space on the menu with tom yum ramen, beef noodle soup, stir-fried noodles and rice, and a pick-your-own-ingredients somtum salad bar.

Restaurateurs Tamy Rofe and Felipe Donnelly, who also run Latin American spot Colonia Verde in Fort Greene, have extended their reach into Manhattan with Comodo inside Gramercy’s Freehand Hotel. The restaurant is actually a revival of sorts for the pair, who opened a former restaurant also named Comodo in downtown Manhattan in 2012. In this new iteration, the menu includes some old favorites like sliders on pao de queijo mixed with brand new additions including wild mushroom al ajillo tacos, made with tortillas sourced from Sobre Masa.

It was quite a year for restaurateur Roni Mazumdar and chef Chintan Pandya, the hitmaking duo behind runaway success Dhamaka on the Lower East Side — which debuted in early 2021 — and acclaimed Queens restaurant Adda. Last fall, they turned their focus to Semma, a South Indian restaurant taking over the old location of four-year-old spot Rahi in Greenwich Village. Mazumdar and Pandya tapped chef Vijay Kumar, formerly of Michelin-starred Rasa in Burlingame, California, to lead the kitchen at Semma, where he’s drawing on intimate childhood memories to spotlight regional South Indian fare that is less ubiquitous in NYC.

One of the West Village’s most prominent dining duos, Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, have unexpectedly torn a page from the playbook of the Shakers — a religious group rooted in Christianity and founded in upstate New York in the 1770s — for their follow-up act to neighborhood favorites Via Carota and Bar Pisellino. At the Commerce Inn, the menu takes its cues from century-old rural American recipes, honing in on simple plates like beans and pork belly, spoon bread, and smoked cod cakes. The restaurant includes both a tavern and a dining room, although only the former is open for service as of early January.

Manhattan’s Chinatown recently gained an exciting new dining destination in Mott Street Eatery, a bustling 10-stall food court similar to those found in Flushing, Sunset Park, and Elmhurst. During an early visit, Eater critic Robert Sietsema found an impressive array of roasted meats, well-executed hand rolls from a sushi chef known as Jiro, and duck and lobster pizza, among other offerings.

“Something new in Chinatown,” was co-owner Jimmy Fong’s vision behind Cha Kee, a Japanese-inflected Chinese diner that opened in the neighborhood in mid-September. In the kitchen, executive chef Akiko Thurnauer is overseeing a lively dinner menu that includes sake-steamed mussels and a sweet-and-sour pork marinated in koji and dehydrated pineapple; while a daytime spread of Hong Kong comfort foods is sold from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Chef Surbhi Sahni is aiming to create an environment akin to her home kitchen at Tagmo, her jewel-toned restaurant in the Seaport District. Sahni started the business as an online sweets shop, gained a following for her high-end takes on mithai, small Indian confections, and then launched a savory meal delivery service during the pandemic. That work has culminated in a 28-seat restaurant of the same name, where she runs a dinner menu of regional Indian favorites and sells sweets, cookbooks, spices, and sauces in the front of the shop.