This lively Little Italy restaurant is one of your best bets for classic red-sauce cuisine in New York City. Make sure to try one of the homemade pastas, and one of the ultra thin-crust pizzas.

Tucked away on a side street, this may be the rustic Greek taverna you’ve dreamed about, offering steaming plates of zucchini fritters, fried salt-cod with garlicky skordalia, and fresh fish brought right to the restaurant by Long Island fishermen who are friends of the owner and left swimming on the porch in buckets. -- Robert Sietsema.

There’s too damn little of the peanutty and coco-creamy Indonesian food in town; this friendly small café offers the hawker food of Jakarta, a riotous mix of fried chicken in several guises served with fiery sambals and a boiled egg; chicken and lamb satays, and salads featuring tofu, peanut sauce, sprouts, and the compressed cylinders of rice starch called lontong. -- Robert Sietsema

Maybe the art at the attached the museum ain’t always so good, but you can depend on this Motrealithic café to turn out food stunningly beautiful and stunningly delicious, with colorful flourishes worthy of a Mondrian or Kandinsky, via chef Hugue Dufour. Open only in the afternoons till 6 p.m. -- Robert Sietsema.