Bang Bar NYT Critic’s Pick1 starSandwiches$MidtownIf anybody grasps the cultural implications of bringing shawarma-style street meat inside the Shops at Columbus Circle, where it can perfume the air breathed by consumers of Pink shirts and Floga furs, it is David Chang. But if provocation is his aim, he has also come up with some fascinating sandwiches, including a mortadella and cheese “mini” that would take care of almost any hangover.By Pete Wells
Thai Farm Kitchen NYT Critic’s PickThai$KensingtonJess Calvo and his wife, Elizabeth Kanyawee Calvo, ran a hydroponic farm in Thailand before moving to Brooklyn to open this small restaurant devoted to Ms. Calvo’s grandmother’s recipes.By Ligaya Mishan
Millbrook Winery NYT Critic’s PickAustralian$$$$JarrahdaleThe narrative is irresistible: a chef who grows almost every ingredient on your plate, who saves seeds from year to year, and who coaxes beautiful meals from the same verdant land you gaze upon as you eat. This is the story of Millbrook restaurant and its chef, Guy Jeffreys. Millbrook is on a 300-acre winery of the same name in Jarrahdale, Western Australia, about a 50-minute drive from Perth.By Besha Rodell
Hwaban NYT Critic’s Pick2 starKorean$$$ChelseaYouth has been a key part of the story of Korean cuisine’s spread from immigrants’ kitchens to the Instagram feeds of diners without a single Korean ancestor. Hwaban, which opened in Chelsea in August, is something different. It’s the modern Korean restaurant where you’d take your mother. By Pete Wells
Berber Street Food NYT Critic’s PickAfrican, Middle Eastern, Moroccan$$West VillageThis tiny pan-African restaurant, opened by Diana Tandia, who grew up in Mauritania, is at once humble and elegant.By Ligaya Mishan
Bluebird London NYT Critic’s Pick0.5 starFairAmerican, English$$$MidtownSir Terence Conran opened the original Bluebird in 1997 in London. It was one of his “gastrodomes,” restaurants embedded within a busy hive of shops, cafes and bars.By Pete Wells
The Four Seasons Restaurant NYT Critic’s Pick1 starSeafood$$$$MidtownDriven out of their longtime home in the Seagram Building, Julian Niccolini and Alex von Bidder have tried to revive the Four Seasons through the elegant seafood cookery of Diego Garcia and the desserts of a consummate professional, Bill Yosses. Mr. Niccolini pleaded guilty in 2016 to a misdemeanor assault charge arising from an incident at the old restaurant, the latest in a string of allegations women have brought against him. He and Mr. von Bidder have made the restaurant better than it has been in years just as society has lost patience for behavior like Mr. Niccolini’s.By Pete Wells
Nansense NYT Critic’s PickAfghan$Downtown BrooklynMohibullah Rahmati, known as Mo, was born in Queens to Afghan immigrants who fled their country after the 1979 Soviet invasion. At his food truck — an homage in part to the Afghan refugees who, starting in the 1980s, sold coffee and bagels from pushcarts to make ends meet — he offers his mother’s recipes for mantu, sheer-skinned dumplings; rich korma with a base of tomato and onions caramelized to a near burn; and mashawa, a soup thick as stew and built for winter.By Ligaya Mishan
Saint Julivert Fisherie NYT Critic’s Pick1 starSeafood$$Cobble HillWhat is a fisherie, you ask? If Saint Julivert is anything to go by, then it is a seafood establishment that aspires to be more than a raw bar but does not want to be mistaken for a full-bore restaurant, either.By Pete Wells
The Little Persian Cafe NYT Critic’s PickMiddle Eastern$$HamiltonThe Little Persian Cafe serves some classic Australian cafe fare for breakfast, as well as some Persian crossover dishes. The bread, from a local Persian bakery, is one of the many wonders of this place. (It comes with the dips at dinnertime: mast-o-moosir, made with wild green garlic; or mirza ghasemi, with a base of charcoal-cooked eggplant.). And it accompanies the stews, the deeply flavored fesenjan and the ghormeh sabzi, an intense lamb stew that tastes like the color green cooked down to its grassy herbal essence.By Besha Rodell