GQ's Best New Restaurants in America 2017

I was sitting in the courtyard at Salazar when I finally felt the spark. This was in Frogtown, an industrial sliver of Los Angeles, a stone's throw from the L.A. River. It was chilly and I was alone. When the waiter brought my margarita, he slid a heavy propane heating tower to my table. I listened to the traffic go by beyond the bougainvillea-draped fence and fiddled with the silverware. For several weeks, I had been dining without feeling much of anything for the meals I was consuming. Honestly, I was starting to get worried.

There's one ironclad rule of eating, professionally and otherwise: You always take yourself to dinner. And this January, as I traveled around the country, my unavoidable companion was like many Americans: cranky, anxious, angry, confused—and dubious about the one real requirement of the job, which is to be open to pleasure. The news—glimpsed on the front page of USA Todays in hotel lobbies, overheard on CNN on monitors in airports, playing silently on taxi TV screens—was bad. And dining out night after night, ticking off restaurants on a list that every critic seemed to share, felt useless and out of step.

I can't say exactly what happened at Salazar that shook me out of that stupor. It had to do with the food, of course: carne asada and al pastor in flour tortillas closer to the supple texture of moo shu pancakes than traditional taco wrappers; papas con chorizo, a gloriously thick potato puree flecked with green chorizo; chickens marinated in orange juice and paprika charring on the open grill, their smoke drifting up into the leaves of the African sumacs. It had also to do with the effect of the margarita. Most of all, it had to do with the tables that were filling up in the yard outside what was once an auto-body shop. Salazar was clearly built with summer evenings in mind, and I could imagine it on one of them, bathed in sunset and filled with crowds out of a cell-phone commercial. But right now I was in love with the sense of refuge from the dismal weather—the way the passing cars started to sound as cozy as rain against a window, the flickering of heaters across the courtyard, laughter coming out of the dark as though from a neighboring campsite.

That was when I felt the spark: a glow that was like the buzz of hunger, but not limited to my stomach. I sat very still, to let it grow. This, the spark said, the knowledge bolting through me as though it were new information. This is what restaurants are for.

Did this feeling have anything to do with the fact that Donald Trump had just reaffirmed his intention to build a ludicrous border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and that Salazar's executive chef was born in Mexico City? It did. It's hard to say that eating tacos is a political act—not to mention all too convenient. But to eat at that place, at that moment, felt like a small gesture of defiance.

More simply, in a moment of profound truth destabilization, it felt good to be reminded of some basic, indisputable facts: That our nation's dining—and, by extension, our national culture—is indivisible at every level from the lives and labor, sweat and striving, inspiration and creativity of immigrants and their children. That the entire economic infrastructure of restaurants is built on their backs. That they have determined what and how we eat. That there is no other credible definition of “American food.”

To paraphrase my favorite protest sign, I can't believe we still have to talk about this shit.

But these are times in which it seems that everything that should go without saying needs to be said—among them that the very qualities of pluralism currently under attack are what make our eating more exciting than ever before. That's why this year's Best New Restaurants is dedicated to celebrating places owned or helmed by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Being born elsewhere, or of parents who were, and choosing to build their lives in the United States—those were the sole criteria (besides, of course, opening in the past 18 months or so and being wonderful).

No particular immigrant narrative was required: Daniel Boulud would have qualified, as would David Chang, Wolfgang Puck, Lidia Bastianich, and many others who have profoundly shaped the way we eat. The final Best list includes restaurateurs with roots in Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Palestine, Israel, China, Japan, and that most surprising adversary of this administration: Sweden. While it would be stupid to pretend that émigrés from each of those countries faced the same obstacles—or that they face the same dangers today—it's worth remembering that cultures and foods that once seemed hopelessly alien and unassimilable are now so much part of the fabric of our cuisine that they go unnoticed. Take Young Joni, in Minneapolis, which serves both wood-fired pizzas and Korean small plates; in 2017, could there be a more red-blooded American combination?

One thing the xenophobes have right: Immigrants are everywhere—in every corner of the restaurant world, cooking food that defines the dining ecosystem in this moment. They are a driving force of a food scene that resembles an enormous rummage closet of seemingly endless tastes, styles, influences, and economic models we are privileged to browse for three meals a day, a hive mind of so many tireless bees that it can sometimes feel there's no room for an original buzz: No sooner does the thought “What ever happened to prime rib?” flit across your mind than half of Eater's “Heatmap” is suddenly devoted to its retro-renaissance. My brother, who is a doctor but also an expert backyard smoker, has long mused about leaving medicine behind to open a combination pastrami/ice cream stand. This year a pop-up serving exactly that opened. Two blocks from his house. In the back of a sex shop.

It was hard to be too surprised. After all, we live in an ever more casual world of food trucks and pop-ups, counter service and grab-and-go. By now we're all used to the signifiers of informality: the poured-concrete floor and exposed ductwork, the empty walls, the clever number to bring back to your table after ordering. (Playing cards! Plastic dinosaurs!) Backless chairs are still with us, though I wonder whether they can survive the aging of this foodie generation; dim lighting and small menu type already have dining rooms lit up by baby-boomer iPhones like the encore at a James Taylor show.

It can be difficult to determine whether these are the markings of casual or the markings of cheap. Nearly every dining development can be seen as a creative exercise in getting it done in the face of the industry's ever more formidable mathematics. Too many times the accommodation is cynical, allowing shortcuts and laziness to masquerade as an aesthetic philosophy. But when done with smarts and care, the dance between creativity and economy feels like the future.

Certainly that's the vibe at the gleaming Westfield Santa Anita mall, just east of Pasadena, in the San Gabriel Valley. The complex, when I visited, close to the Lunar New Year, felt like Blade Runner on antidepressants: Chinese pop music and red lanterns in the trees, happy railroads ferrying small children, ponds overflowing with turtles. It is also the home of Johnny Lee's Side Chick, the product of the 30-year-old chef's obsessive pursuit of perfection in a single dish, Hainan chicken rice. It's one of those seemingly simple foods that reward the deep dive of food nerd-dom: Chicken is slowly poached and then served with rice cooked in the resulting broth. Unlike, say, ramen, it's a dish that leaves its cook nowhere to hide. The result is nakedly, unabashedly chicken-y—the beige of a mop with bits of yellow globular fat. It is also, in Lee's version, utterly transporting, meaty, moist, and beguilingly fragrant with ginger. A mandatory side order is a soy-marinated egg: Its yolk is a golden shooter marble the texture of a Godiva truffle.

Taking a step up the formality ladder, we find ourselves at that great American invention called the diner. Everybody nostalgizes diners; with their beautiful utility and rough, democratic hospitality, they are the perfect antidote to the excesses of foodie-ism. But nobody seems to open diners. This year, the team behind Philadelphia's Federal Donuts empire, which includes Israeli superstar chef Michael Solomonov, opened something awfully faithful to the feel and function of one. Occupying a subterranean space not far from Rittenhouse Square, Rooster Soup Co. re-creates a perfect Nighthawks luncheonette—from its red swivel stools to the absurdly fluffy coconut-cream pies sitting in a case behind the Formica counter. Open from breakfast through early-bird dinner, it offers loving re-imaginings of East Coast Jewish-inflected diner favorites: chicken schnitzel served with beet-and-dill spread on homemade Martin's Butter Bread; a chicken potpie enlivened by hawaij, a Yemeni spice blend; smoked-matzo-ball soup. The soup is made with chicken parts left over from the Korean fried chicken they serve at Federal Donuts; the smoke is thanks to borrowed schmaltz from the smoked short rib down the street at one of their other restaurants, Abe Fisher. But creative use of castoffs can't account for the most remarkable thing about Rooster Soup Co.: the fact that 100 percent of its profits benefit a local food charity, the Broad Street Hospitality Collaborative. Here is definitive proof that a higher mission doesn't require diminished deliciousness.

Something of a diner's spirit lingers at Detroit's Flowers of Vietnam, if only in the short-order station and plastic-letter menu board of the onetime “coney” it occupies. The euphonious name evolved, through a series of misreadings, from “Flavors of Vietnam.” The entirety of what the charismatic, media-ready chef George Azar has created here feels just as much like a happy blend of improvisation and accident: the son of Palestinian immigrants cooking Vietnamese food in a Greek diner in Mexicantown. One hopes Azar's gig cooking with the Noma team during its residency in Tulum this spring—while Flowers undergoes a renovation—doesn't polish too many edges off the charm of his operation, not to mention the honeyed funk of his glistening caramel chicken wings, the puckering fresh bite of his papaya salad, or the richness of the Vietnamese egg-cream coffee he offers for dessert.

Surely, if ever there was a year when sheer fun was a good reason to recommend a restaurant, this is it. The giddy, riotous Kemuri Tatsu-ya, from a team that owns Austin's popular Ramen Tatsu-ya, is pure escape. A so-called “Austin izakaya,” its walls are covered with a surreal pastiche of Japanese-Texan kitsch, a saloon out of a Quentin Tarantino fever dream. That immaculate zaniness is reflected equally in wild shochu-based tiki drinks and in dishes like a tamale packed with sticky rice, beef tongue, and shiitakes and a riff on Frito pie made with creamy octopus takoyaki topped with chili, cheese, and smoked jalapeño—a patently stupid dish that my table ordered a second portion of the moment it was gone. As one of my companions said, “If you're not having at least a little fun in here, you're on the wrong Tinder date.”

Every year there's a restaurant on my list that beguiles and calls to me on name alone: This year it was Young Joni, evocative of fresh faces, spring meadows, and endless possibility. That it turned out to be a combination of owners Ann Kim's and Conrad Leifur's mothers' names somehow didn't diminish its power. Twin Citians have already long enjoyed Kim's extraordinary pizzas at Pizzeria Lola and Hello Pizza. Young Joni, in a large industrial space crisscrossed by communal tables and highlighted by a huge copper-skinned wood-burning oven, expands the offerings to small plates: grilled mushrooms bathed in chestnut-miso butter; huge head-on prawns, painted the color of freshly fired brick with red-chile fish sauce. The pizzas are blistered and bubbly and perfect. If the story of a Korean woman making expert pizza in the heartland isn't quite as “It's a Small World” as Flowers of Vietnam's, it's still almost enough to make you leap to your feet reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

For all that, the tasting menu remains the signature style of our time, the battlefield on which all the semiotics of modern dining are being hashed out and contested. Sometimes you can watch that battle being waged at the table in front of you. Take, for instance, the by turns maddening and wonderful Tarsan i Jane, the creative home of Catalan chef Perfecte Rocher, late of L.A.'s smoke.oil.salt (a 2015 GQ Best New Restaurant), and his wife, Alia Zaine, another restaurant veteran, who runs the front of house. The two decamped to Seattle last year with vague plans to open a food cart, when a barn-like space in the Fremont neighborhood fell into their laps. Sticking with the times, the couple keep things spare, prioritizing the wide, open-fire grill in the kitchen while letting strings of hanging terrariums and lanterns make do as decorations. At the same time, they are fatally attracted to some of fine dining's worst pretensions. When you make a reservation via the website, you are treated to a disquisition on “trust,” a lecture that boils down to “Don't ask for salt.” I pitied the server, otherwise stellar, who was forced to follow the policy of not giving tastes of wines by the glass, explaining, “We should be able to tell you what they are like.”

There may have been a time when such forced re-education in the dictatorial power of the chef was necessary, but we're post-no-substitutions now. Or, at the very least, post-manifesto. And I worry that such tonal missteps are keeping Seattleites from Rocher's cooking, which is some of the most alive and enrapturing I tasted all year. Much like the restaurant itself, the Catalan- and Valencian-inspired dishes come to the table buttoned-up and chef-y, then stir to life as their many components seem to relax, sighing into one another: In one, raw pieces of rockfish are tossed with sesame seeds, thin threads of dried chile, and a dehydrated-plum powder that sends electric jolts through the fish. A tangled heap of lamb belly and black trumpet mushrooms comes fairly vibrating with a sharp stab of citrus, provided by a Bodegas Sauci sherry gelée, and the nearly effervescent spice of bay-leaf oil. On Sundays, Tarsan i Jane serves a five-course menu of more rustic but equally entrancing dishes, anchored by vast pans of paella—a fingernail-deep layer of perfectly crusty rice that makes you forgive the accompanying page of text lecturing about its authenticity.

And to be fair, negotiating the rules and language of dining these days is hard—when to go low, when to go high, what to keep of the past, and what to discard. Maybe it's no surprise that a restaurant in Brooklyn—a place that, like Los Angeles, has become a diverse mash-up of dining styles and influences from around the world—seemed to me to crack the code. There's a tragic, wan aspect to Aska's Swedish-born chef, Fredrik Berselius, as though he were an art student or a Goethe hero. You want to buy him a sandwich and a ticket for a roller coaster. Amazing, then—especially in the genre of multi-course tasting menus that can so easily turn into an endurance test—how attentive this second iteration of Aska is to comfort and pleasure.

When you sit in the darkened dining room, cosseted from the rumble of the Williamsburg Bridge, just above, you're informed that the table is yours for the evening; you should feel free to determine the pace of the meal—perhaps take a stroll if the mood strikes. Berselius stands, dramatically lit, among his clutch of cooks in the open kitchen, bent over a square counter like a painting of medieval medical students performing an autopsy. But the sense is less that of a theatrical performance than of an actual restaurant.

You can make conversation with your companion without worrying about keeping your eyes on the show. More miraculous, there are smells and sounds of real cooking, rather than the empty air of cold, clinical composition. The dish descriptions, delivered by rotating chefs, may take the usual Dadaist turns: “After we set the lamb's heart on fire, we crush it to get this powder.” “Next to the bladder wrack, you have a blue-mussel emulsion.” “Instead of milk, we use pig's blood.” But they appear on the plate just as concerned with feeding your belly as with feeding your mind: a slippery raw langoustine bound in twine to a bundle of smoldering fragrant pine branches; a sea scallop bathing in a broth of elderflower; beef, aged to the very edge of spoiling, and then topped with its own cured fat cap, an unctuous translucent jelly that's like the roe of some mythical cow-fish. There is no greater cliché in neo-Nordic cooking than lichen; I've nodded politely at it any number of times. But Berselius's reindeer moss—gathered in the Catskills and served partly submerged in a rich wild-mushroom broth—was the first time I got the point and the enjoyment.

Above all, while the arched windows are reminiscent of Noma, and the animal pelts on the chairs in the downstairs lounge are unmistakably Scandinavian, Aska feels like it could be nowhere other than Brooklyn. Indeed, it feels like Brooklyn's best, most sophisticatedly bohemian version of itself. Is it surprising that it took someone born 4,000 miles away to figure out what that means and bring it to life? Of course not. That's how it works.

In tasting menus, the power of the chef as autonomous artist finds its expression; in the casual revolution, you see the creativity born of democratized dining and thorny economics. Where these two shaping forces meet may be where you find the most exciting food of the moment.

Witness the strange and beautiful Han Oak in Portland, Oregon. Chatting at the counter one night, chef Peter Cho, who moved west after years working with April Bloomfield in New York City, expressed some ambivalence about landing on the long list of James Beard Award nominees for Best New Restaurant. “It's not really what we're trying to do here,” he said. “I mean, we're only open two days a week.”

He was selling himself short—the place is open an additional two days with an à la carte menu of dumplings and noodles—but usually I'd be inclined to agree with him. Pop-ups—of both the roving and permanent varieties, the latter of which Han Oak resembles—have become an undeniably valuable part of the culinary landscape, as places to experiment and gain exposure, and as stepping-stones to permanent businesses. But to measure them against proper restaurants is to disrespect the vastly more difficult day-in and day-out art of restauranting. It's like giving a truck-driving award to someone who did a really nice job moving her couch in a U-Haul last Saturday.

Still, Han Oak feels like a special case. It occupies an industrial building with rolling garage-door bays. Cho lives in the same space, with his wife and 2-year-old son. When I was there, the family sat alongside me at the counter, the little boy too fixated on watching Finding Nemo on a laptop to be bothered to eat his father's food. Cho's father lingered nearby, while his mother rolled dumplings. I don't know what voodoo Cho uses to retain a full set of non-family servers and cooks for four days of service (plus occasional private events), but for all the warm, familial vibe, the place runs as smoothly and professionally as any I saw in my travels.

On the plate, Cho opts for soulful over pyrotechnic, though a simple technique of steaming and then deep-frying sweet potatoes yields something so deliciously crunchy and rich you're conditioned to assume some higher science is involved. Other banchan, the array of small dishes that introduce a Korean meal, would be at home at any farm-to-table restaurant, like cubes of winter squash flecked with fried garlic and lemon zest. Meanwhile, a main course of smoked hanger steak with cabbage slaw might make you feel like you're deep in Texas. But the heart of the menu remains in simple home-style Korean dishes: a bowl of hand-cut noodles in chicken broth tinged with scallion and soy sauce, squares of koji-marinated pork belly served with cold discs of daikon, and rice cakes. The four-course tasting menu cost me an absurd $35, though Cho warns that it may go up to $45, still a number that would hardly cause an eye-bat attached to a single entrée at many New York restaurants. Simply put, Han Oak is a unicorn: something magical to be seen at all costs, before it notices it's among us and promptly disappears.

Or, finally, there's Kato, tucked away in a West L.A. strip mall, in a space so tiny that a man arriving with a guitar while I was there represented a crisis of space (the instrument wound up taking its own seat at the small counter). If there's any place to watch the collision of creativity and economics, it's California, which is facing a minimum-wage hike that will fundamentally alter how restaurants are run. Certainly it will mean a final farewell to such extraneous labor as busboys, runners, hostesses, anyone to answer the phone, and so on. At Kato, there are three people running the front of house, where once there might have been six. You're introduced to all three upon entering, and they gracefully rotate duties, dropping by the table, bringing drinks and ferrying 25-year-old chef Jonathan Yao's food from the kitchen.

Such efficiency is presumably what allows Yao to keep his tasting menus to a shockingly mild $55 or less. He has a prodigy's sense of flavor and restraint, with dishes that tease notes of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian cuisine: dashi-braised octopus atop a salad of crispy rice and herbs dressed with fish sauce; a warm porridge that mingles Dungeness crab, uni, and the umami pulse of dried scallop. The sole mild disappointment was a too tough piece of Wagyu beef accompanied by pickled celery and an XO sauce, Wagyu being precisely the kind of luxury ingredient a place like this doesn't need, and XO having become what Sriracha was a few years ago, a ubiquitous cheat. The light touch is thrown to the wind on the list of supplements you can add between your savory and dessert courses: rice drowned in pork-belly gravy, for instance, or a fried-chicken sandwich topped with a bright slaw of cabbage, fish sauce, and herbs. It is delicious, of course, if unwieldy: Like most chicken sandwiches, it seems designed to be photographed as much as eaten. But if Instagrams help subsidize the rest of what Yao is up to (and I saw a sandwich on every table in the place, including mine), it's hard to complain.

At once creative and disciplined, thrillingly new and comfortably familiar. In other words, like all of this year's list, the best of what we hope for in an American restaurant. I don't know if the spark I re-discovered at Salazar can be kept alive; I've lost and found it several times since. Frankly, I don't know if we're all going to be okay. I only know that one thing we can do is keep repeating that these are the things that matter—aloud and as often as possible. And then go out and eat, together.

Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.

This story originally appeared in the May 2017 issue with the title The Perfect Night Out: GQ's Best New Restaurants 2017”