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 includes 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 cocktail bar is stocked with Malaysian white coffee martinis and wau-lahs, “a Singaporean version of a piña colada,” as Mehta puts it.

At Shukette, a playful spin-off of Mediterranean favorite Shuka in Soho, acclaimed chef Ayesha Nurdjaja has long-awaited access to an open kitchen, a charcoal grill, and a long list of breakout dishes to try. Early hits include the restaurant’s spicy summer cherry salad, and don’t miss the lineup of housemade dips and breads including a smoked salt cod spread and grilled lafa. Aim for a seat at the counter, where the kitchen team might slip in a few off-menu dishes.

Last summer’s most-talked-about fish and chips pop-up has turned into one of this year’s hardest-to-get reservations. Dame, an English-rooted seafood restaurant from chef Ed Szymanski and co-owner Patricia Howard, opened its doors in June and customers have been pouring in ever since to try the team’s ever-evolving menu of playful seafood dishes. The fish and chips are still around, but they are now in good company among squid and shishito skewers, curried monkfish kebabs, and smoked whitefish croquettes.

From the team behind East Village cocktail bar Mister Paradise, Electric Burrito is a tiny counter-service spot that focuses on variations of just one thing: the French fry-filled burritos of San Diego, California. And if the lines out the door are any indication, they’re doing that one thing very well. Start with the original California burrito, made with french fries, carne asada, and pico de gallo, and slather on some of the complimentary creamy, zingy orange sauce.

A rare Manhattan Haitian restaurant, Rebel, joined the Lower East Side dining scene earlier this spring. Must-order dishes from the menu include lambi, or conch fricasseed in a garlic tomato sauce, and griot, with fatty chunks of pork that are boiled in a Seville orange marinade and then fried in a process that produces “flavorful and richly textured” meat, according to Eater critic Robert Sietsema.

Samuel Clonts and Raymond Trinh have years of experience between the two of them at fine-dining establishments such as Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and Bar Uchū. At the duo’s first joint restaurant opening, they’ve kept the tasting-menu format but have done away with the break-the-bank-account price tags. In the 40-seat main dining room, Clonts’ modern American menu is available only as a seven-course experience ($92). The latest version of the tasting kicks off with a creative play on the breakfast taco with the addition of ingredients like ajitama (a seasoned egg with a custardy yolk) and trout roe. Other seasonally driven dishes include smoked corn paired with razor clams and caviar; roasted tomato agnolotti; and baked alaska with strawberry and yuzu. In the adjoining bar area, where Trinh oversees the beverage side of the restaurant, the menu can be ordered a la carte at the U-shaped marble bar or others seats overlooking the open kitchen, which is anchored by a wood-fired oven left over from when Speedy Romeo occupied the Lower East Side space. An optional add-on of a caviar handroll ($55) nods to Clonts and Trinh’s previous time at Uchū.

Dustin Wilson, a former wine director at Eleven Madison Park, and Austin Johnson, a former chef at the one-Michelin-star Frenchie in Paris, took over a Tribeca townhouse earlier this year. They converted the residence into One White Street, an upscale, three-story neighborhood restaurant that offers both a seven-course tasting menu and an a la carte lineup that includes grilled scallop skewers and garlicky roasted tomato focaccia. A good chunk of the produce for Johnson’s vegetable-laden menu come from the restaurant’s own farm in the Hudson Valley, which supplies One White Street with fresh crops of in-season veggies all year long.

“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.

Perched on the top of a Financial District skyscraper, Saga is a fine dining experience where customers can wine and dine while eye-level with passing helicopters. Chef James Kent and general manager Jeff Katz — industry veterans who built up a following with their neighborhood hit Crown Shy located on the ground floor of the same building — are now putting their own, slightly more relaxed spin on the rarified world of NYC fine dining with an intimate restaurant that spills out onto jaw-dropping outdoor terraces. But the views aren’t the only selling point at Saga and its upper-level cocktail bar Overstory. The restaurant offers a $245-per-person tasting menu that nods to “the things that are really important to me, and that I’ve learned over my life,” chef Kent tells Eater, with dishes taking cues from his Moroccan background and his childhood days spent fishing off of a Long Island houseboat.