On the western edge of Chelsea, find Hav & Mar, a new restaurant from Marcus Samuelsson. Handily merging the food of Sweden, Ethiopia, and New York, the celebrity chef presents an array of unlikely dishes, including Addis York, his version of the Ethiopian stew doro wat, featuring glazed chicken drumsticks triumphantly pointing skyward. The bread basket alone, containing fried injera, is worth visiting the restaurant for, and the best dish on the menu is the cavatelli with seafood in a creamy uni sauce.

This decade-old pizza pioneer opened in Chelsea’s gallery district way before most other restaurants appeared there, with the exception of the Red Cat and a couple of other old-timers, most now long gone. The space is warehouse-like, the bar provides cocktails in addition to beer and wine, and the exemplary pizzas fly from a wood oven that casts flickering shadows on the brick walls — a perfect date spot.

Before the current mania for Italian authenticity swept over the city, many cured pork products such as guanciale and lardo were tough to find unless you dropped by Salumeria Biellese. These ingredients are still for sale in glass cases, even though manufacturing has since shifted to Hackensack, New Jersey. These days, this 90-year-old pork store mounts a steam table full of red-sauce pastas at lunchtime, plus a menu of giant hero sandwiches. Order one that’s made with the shop’s distinguished charcuterie. 

When it opened in 2015, in the culinary dead zone that is Ninth Avenue in upper Chelsea, Jun-Men seemed to be part of the race among ramen-yas to see who could make the richest tonkotsu, a milky, pork-bone broth. The noodles themselves are above average, with plenty of spicy options, and the short list of appetizers is worth ordering from as well, especially the crunchy chicken wings and the stylish kale salad. But avoid the house mazemen, which wastes some perfectly good sea urchin in a wash of warm noodles.

After a several-year hiatus, Txikito has returned to Chelsea with a bang, peddling Basque small plates of octopus, poached cod, beef cheek and jowl, and king oyster mushroom carpaccio. The chefs are the wife-and-husband team of Alex Raij and Eder Montero, and the premises recall a Spanish tapas bar in style, intimacy, and good smells.

While the Chinese restaurants in this neighborhood once offered almost exclusively Chinese American fare, many have become more sophisticated, including the outstanding Hey Yuet. It’s one of the city’s better restaurants serving Cantonese dim sum and dishes from Hong Kong. From classic har gow to newfangled black bao adorned with a gold leaf, some of the best dim sum in town is to be found here all day and into the night.

This homey Italian restaurant on the edge of Chelsea’s gallery district makes a nice refuge after an afternoon of art-hopping. Founded in 1997, it used to be part of a great chain specializing in discount pastas whipped up on the spot, and part of that aura remains, though the menu now concentrates on antipasti, panini, and pizzas, with the occasional risotto or lasagna thrown in for good measure.

Located in one of Chelsea’s quieter sections surrounded by distinguished older buildings, Cookshop was founded with a farm-to-table ethos in 2005 and has gradually grown to be a favorite spot for a tumultuous brunch or a quieter dinner. Vegetables are emphasized — even in its inventive pizzas — and there’s a substantial commitment to seafood, while many appetizers and entrees are prepared in a wood-fired oven.

El Quijote, founded in 1930, ranks among the city’s oldest Spanish restaurants. Located in the fabled Hotel Chelsea, it was sold and then closed for renovations, only to reopen last year. The premises are smaller than before, but the dining room is still charmingly decorated with elaborate murals, and a stop at the bar for a drink and some tapas remains one of Chelsea’s quintessential experiences.

When it opened in 1994, Johny’s was located in Chelsea’s warehouse district between Sixth and Seventh avenues, an area also famed for its flea markets, now mainly gone. Johny’s was and still is just a tiny lunch counter serving eggs, pancakes, hamburgers, and sandwiches, but it has adapted to more modern times with a longer menu of invented heroes with names like Sloppy Johny and Curious George. Some sandwiches even have french fries tucked inside.

Call them heroes, panini, or just Italian sandwiches, but Pisillo, which also has an outpost in the Financial District, excels at them. The menu is long, with Italian ingredients painstakingly listed for each of the various options, but this simple sandwich piled with mortadella, arugula, and squeakingly fresh mozzarella might be best of all.

It’s rare that a well-regarded Maritime Brooklyn restaurant hastens into Manhattan, but that’s what happened with Memo. In this case, the restaurant is a Kings Highway Turkish establishment founded in 2000, which popped up here at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, one of Chelsea’s busiest corners. The doner kebab is fantastic (and quickly served); pick lamb and be assured you’re getting lamb and not the unsatisfying lamb-beef hybrid currently being peddled elsewhere. Plenty of salads, bread dips, pastries, and other kebabs are also worth trying.

Chef Myo Moe introduced the city to Burmese food seven years ago with pop-ups in Bushwick bars, then opened her own place in Prospect Heights. Now there’s a branch in Chelsea, brightly decorated with white tiles and walls, and big windows that create a sense of airiness. For an introduction to the food of Myanmar, consider the mohinga, a noodle soup made with a strong broth flavored with crushed fish.

While the original branch of Hao Noodle in the Village skewed toward Sichuan food and tea, this magnificent location in Chelsea strays toward Shanghai. Yes, there are gravy-squirting soup dumplings, but also find delicate little charcoal kebabs of meat and offal, smoked and then fried filet of sole, and slabs of hawthorn jelly interspersed with avocado for what is certainly a surprising Chinese dish. You can’t go wrong with the noodles, either.

This restaurant, named for its chef Alfred Portale, offers a menu of Italian classic dishes in a fine dining vein, with the conventional three courses plus pizzas and desserts. The antipasti are particularly fine, including a perfect seafood salad of lobster, scallops, octopus, shrimp, and avocado. The menu also lists a handful of pasta and secondi, and the one labeled “maiale” (Italian for “pig”) combines hunks of pork with polenta cake and a zingy orange mostarda.

Founded by a son of legendary Taiwanese chef Shorty Tang, who was partly responsible for introducing Sichuan food to Chinatown , this Chelsea restaurant was called Shorty Tang Noodles when it opened in 2017. The place closed for a few months, then re-emerged with this shortened name and an expanded selection of dim sum, soups, and noodle stir-fries made with homemade noodles, some of them spicy. The cold sesame noodles remain a signature, but there’s also a fine Taiwanese beef noodle soup.

Sometimes you need a good, greasy breakfast for dinner and Chelsea is one of the few neighborhoods with streets are still lined with old-school Greek diners. Hollywood is one of them, striving to give itself a touch of glamour with the name. In addition to all-day breakfasts, Hollywood does great burgers.

As Georgian restaurants in the city have moved into Manhattan and become more sophisticated, they’ve added impressive wine lists focusing on the grapes of the region and expanded their menus of pomegranate-strewn appetizers, herby stews, and, of course, a wide variety of khachapuris, the famous cheese-stuffed bread with an egg in the middle. Chama Mama rates as one of the city’s best Georgian spots; among its better dishes are the lamb-stuffed grape leaves and game hen in garlic broth.

This quintessential sushi takeout spot moved a block up last year and got fancier in the process. Three sushi chefs are now spotlit at the counter, rapidly packaging fish for a line of delivery cyclists while the three elegant dining rooms nearby sit largely empty. The prices are better than expected for sushi of this quality, and chefs will occasionally slip customers who dine in a complimentary piece of tuna belly as part of the budget assortment.