New York for foodies

Best restaurants

New York's restaurant map is less a scene than a stack of overlapping neighbourhoods, and this list stays inside a tight radius of Lower Manhattan: Chambers Street down through the Financial District, William and Fulton and Beekman, with a walk east to Chinatown for the dumpling house that never really closed. These are twelve places you can get into on a weeknight, chosen because each one does a specific thing well: a room, a cuisine, an hour of the day the block belongs to. There is a broker-district Italian, a Cuban counter that has fed lunch to the same office towers for years, a diner open from 06:00, a Russian dining room attached to a Wall Street bathhouse, and a Japanese kitchen from a chef whose website still lives at davidbouley.com. If you want the tasting-menu circuit, look elsewhere; if you want to eat well within a fifteen-minute walk of the Brooklyn Bridge, start here.