The 13 Dishes (and Other Things) I Can't Stop Thinking About

In the nearly three months I spend on the road in search of a perfect night out, I eat dozens of meals that may not be Perfect but are perfectly wonderful. Here are some highlights from 2018:

Some of the best pianists in New Orleans drop in throughout the day to take a turn at the upright piano in the center of this coffee shop/bakery. But it’s Chaya Conrad’s desserts that are the real draw. (Disclosure: It is my local and I am writing this while sitting there right now.) Top of the list, lately, has been a savory hand pie—NOLA-specific flavors like gumbo ya-ya, crawfish étouffée, and crab au gratin—chased by one of its sweet cousins, inspired by the much-lamented Simon Hubig Co., whose pie factory burned down several years ago and has not returned. (Sweet potato is my favorite.) God gave you two fists, didn’t he? It was to hold pies.

Somebody forgot to tell Fabio Trabocchi that fine dining was dead. His new Spanish restaurant in the $2.5 billion District Wharf development is a palace of old-school luxury. One spectacular case in point: the soft, brick red mound of Mallorcan sausage called sobrasada. It arrives via gueridon, pushed by a uniformed server who then heats a shiny spoon with a high-powered torch before scooping out a portion.

Lots of chefs claim to want to escape fine-dining; few have done it as convincingly as Scott Clark, the eponymous "dad," who left his job as chef-de-cuisine of Saison to surf mornings while selling burgers and salads out of a vintage early-20th-century train caboose on the edge of a parking lot. The food is all delicious, but sometimes a restaurant is more about the journey than the destination. You get an excuse to drive the thirty miles from San Francisco down Highway 1 and a stellar parking-lot lunch; Clark gets to live the dream. Run, Dad run!

Sometimes the cow needs to take a backseat to the pig in the steak department, even in Texas. Everything I tried on the long menu at this cool, expansive Mediterranean restaurant was impeccable, but nothing stuck with me like the secreto, a "secret" skirt-steak-like cut, in this case from the shoulder of a rich, gamy Iberico pig. Served naked and scored atop a pile of crisp patatas bravas and pools of red pimento sauce and green mojo verde, it had nowhere to hide—and no reason to.

It’s worth bringing enough friends to this Deep Ellum taco joint that you can order the whole menu. But if you must choose, go for the one filled with Michoacán octopus “carnitas”: slow-cooked, crisped with butter on the flat-top grill, and served in a tortilla with fried leek and jalapeño salsa.

“A special dish from ‘Phu Chiem’ in Quang Nam Provence, where it was created,” reads the menu at this casual, verging on slapdash, spot far from the more gentrified precincts of downtown Oakland. It’s one sign of the seriousness with which chef Geoffrey Deetz returned from sixteen years of living in Vietnam, intent on cooking authentic Vietnamese food. The dish consists of shrimp, pork, quail egg, peanuts, herbs, and more, all aswim among fat, slippery noodles atop a bed of sesame leaf, mint, lettuce, and banana blossom. It’s an unfolding riot of texture in every bite.

It's no secret why Israeli food remains one of the most prevalent and beloved trends of the past few years: For one thing, it has a relatively low barrier to entry, for both restaurant and audience. (Who doesn't like bread and yogurt?) For another, it feels like a feast at a time when we feel like feasting. Nothing gives you that feeling more than settling into one of the metal sidewalk chairs at this Silver Lake corner spot, brushing away the menu scrawled on butcher paper and simply demanding "Fire Menu"—that is, bring it all. The tininess of the table just adds to the clown-car sense of bounty.

Five years after leaving the restaurants they started with Keith McNally—Balthazar, Pastis, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, and Minetta Tavern—Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson have opened an idiosyncratic and adventurous Tribeca bistro all their own. If the famous Black Label Burger defined their old style, this ethereal dish of scrambled eggs and snails is emblematic of the new. The eggs are slowly cooked until they are the texture of silky polenta; you drag the snails—tiny bombs of butter and herbs—through them, leaving briny green trails. It’s a dish you go back and forth between wanting to savor in tiny bites and devour in three.

This new Adams Morgan hotel has gone all in on dining as its defining characteristic: There are no fewer than four different eateries in what was a long-vacant church. In the lobby, Brothers and Sisters serves imaginative international fare like a “hot dog” fashioned from a fat, scored octopus tentacle. Nearby, Spoken English (not yet open when I visited) serves what it calls Asian street food. There are sensational pastries at the coffee stand near the entrance. And upstairs is A Rake’s Progress, Spike Gjerde’s ambitious and very promising fine-dining restaurant devoted to Mid-Atlantic bounty.

What to do with rabbit forelegs left over from making rabbit-liver terrine and rabbit confit? At this charming neighborhood restaurant, the obvious answer is to toss them in rice flour and pan-fry them with brown butter, capers, and lemon—a kind of glaze à la meunière that will have you forgetting about chicken.

A heretofore nonexistent category, this one, but at some point this year, I had to wonder: Where is all the kohlrabi coming from? Does the word just go out across the land one morning? “Tear up the fields! Plant kohlrabi! We need kohlrabi!” In any event, the best use I saw for the suddenly ubiquitous cabbage variant was at Claire Welle and Samantha Safer’s ambitious Clinton Hill bistro, where thin slices of it were rolled into cool, crisp white tubes filled with a flavorful whip of ham, sesame seed, and chervil.

I’ve written before about Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone’s loving, fantastical reinvention of mid-century New York dining in the site of the original Four Seasons, where you’re greeted by a groaning board of cold appetizers—Hams! Crudités! Liverwurst! Clam cocktail! There’s no better introduction to one of the greatest restaurant spaces the world has ever known.

Note the references to Dallas above, consider that I didn’t eat a bad meal in two visits there this year, and don’t be surprised if the third point in the Texan triangle starts to get the kind of attention already bestowed on Austin and Houston.

Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.