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In this week’s edition: Tammie Teclemariam heads to Dumbo for vegan ramen. Plus: Our favorite food, drinks, and restaurants of 2024.

Photo: Courtesy of Ippudo V

There are two likely reasons why Ippudo V, the sixth New York location of the Japanese ramen chain, hasn’t achieved the line-out-the-door status of its other outposts despite having opened this summer. First, the V stands for “vegan,” and the window and sidewalk signs proclaiming “vegan ramen” may be doing more harm than good regarding the people who rightly associate Ippudo’s noodle soup with the essence of pork. (A co-worker walks past the space several times a week and told me that he never even realized it was an Ippudo.) The other detrimental detail is that this restaurant is located in Dumbo, and not the cute waterfront part of Dumbo. This restaurant is in bridge-overpass Dumbo at a particularly windy intersection of construction and multilane traffic. 

But Ippudo V is worth a stop, especially on the windiest night, no matter what one’s meat-eating credentials might be. Right away, it doesn’t seem quite like a “restaurant” owing to a full-fledged gift shop hawking Ippudo-branded gear — a rack of hoodies, stacks of tie-dye T-shirts and caps, insulated water bottles — immediately to the left of the entrance. But behind the streetwear is an open kitchen facing a brightly lit bar that, along with the random coffee-table books and plastic ivy wall, evokes a co-working space. The menu is presented via a QR code imprinted on a wood block. 

The plants may be fake, but the vegan menu doesn’t lean on Impossible-style imitation protein, except for something called “soy meat,” which appears in one of the ramen dishes and which I also suspect could be the “plant-based pork” found in the gyoza. All four soups — soy, miso, “chicken,” “pork” — are largely garnished with vegetables cut and cooked to various effects, like a slice of grilled tomato and onion tempura in the soy broth. (Plant-based “tuna” shows up in some of the sushi rolls, but the one I had was skippable; you are coming here for the noodles.)

This happens to be the first vegan Ippudo out of its many locations in California, Europe, and all over the Pacific, and while there does seem to be some component overlap with the vegan options at a “regular” New York Ippudo — tofu chashu, fried enoki mushrooms — the dishes at Ippudo V feel totally different, starting with tonkotsu-inspired broth, as cloudy as the recipe made from pork bones and possibly more savory. My server suggested stirring in a scoop of natto — fermented soy — for a flavor boost, but the soup was salty and rich enough to support the thick, curly ramen noodles that were still plenty chewy as I ate them. Those noodles also fared better than the thinner wheat noodles in a clear, poultrylike broth, though I liked the heavy dose of leeks, cabbage, and garlic chips that perfumed the bowl. 

Compared to a recent stop at the East Village Ippudo, which had a wait list at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I can say that the bowl-for-bowl experience is currently better at Ippudo V, even if it’s not on the radar of ramen trackers yet. In Dumbo, two guys sitting next to me at the bar had stopped in on their way back to Queens after a Nets game after learning about it on social media. One of them, a vegetarian Japanophile, told me that he thinks of Ippudo as “the old gray lady of ramen,” where “vegetarians seem like an afterthought.” This, he said, felt different. That hunch was reinforced when my miso ramen arrived under a dome of glass. The server lifted the lid and woody smoke floated across the bar. My new friends were impressed with the show. “This,” one said, “was not on the TikTok.”

By Chris Crowley, Tammie Teclemariam, and Matthew Schneier

Duck with cherries from Le Veau d’Or Photo: Thomas Prior

In picking our favorite new restaurants of the year, we threw price and prestige out the window to focus on spots that we think most completely achieved the goals they set for themselves, whether that’s building the best new East Village taco shop or a 16th-floor tasting-menu oasis. The only criterion we weighed was deliciousness, and the most difficult part of this assignment was limiting ourselves to just ten places. (We saw so much that we assembled a separate list of the best sandwiches, momos, doughnuts, and noodles, among a pile of other highlights.) But the places below stood out in an extremely crowded field by getting a million little details right and forcing us to ask ourselves that all-important question: When can we go back?

Over the past dozen months, as our food team ducked into the subterranean seafood shanties, plush hotel lobbies, and revamped chrome diners that make up this year’s roster of new restaurants, we kept noticing a particular feeling: It all seemed so fun. There were no chefs pontificating on the genius of their own recipes, no processions of overtweezered intricacies, no “suggested” dress codes that forced us to swap out our old sneakers. Instead, we found drink lists filled with Moxie (the soda, in addition to some chutzpah), banchan platters inspired by Korean cabbies, overstuffed dessert trolleys, and even noodles drenched in Sprite (again: the soda). Stuffing our faces each night is not always the dream assignment it may sound like — one person can tackle only so many shellfish towers in a week — but after a joyful year of eating, these are the highlights that made us most excited to head out again and again.

Lunch lines start to form outside Radio Bakery (135 India St., at Manhattan Ave., Greenpoint) well ahead of 11 a.m., when sandwiches are released. This is because the fresh, craggy sesame focaccia is stuffed with a salad’s worth of dressed Tuscan kale and chunky pesto that gives necessary heft to sliced turkey galantine. Great lashings of olive oil help everything stick together to melt further into the crumb of the bread.

It’s the rare stunt dish that’s also delicious, but lobster “triangoli” at San Sabino (113 Greenwich Ave., at Jane St.) delivers. Four unassuming ravioli are covered in “white vodka sauce” — Alfredo in all but name — and a heavy scattering of powdered black garlic. The show begins when the black-and-white pastas are pierced to release the crimson shellfish-butter sauce hiding inside — as striking as it is silly.

The Gilda is queen of the Basque pintxos, yet it is just three items skewered on a toothpick. Still, wow. With its canonical combination of anchovy, pickled pepper, and Manzanilla olive, there may be no greater volume-to-punch ratio in all of cookery. At Eel Bar (252 Broome St., nr. Orchard St.), Aaron Crowder serves his two to an order, subbing pickled cucumber for the usual pepper, while at Bar Oliver (1 Oliver St., at St. James Pl.) nearby, a single Gilda (named for the Rita Hayworth film) is done in the classic style first made in San Sebastián in the ’40s. Across the island at The Otter, the Gilda’s puckery profile is repurposed as a dressing for tuna tartare.

Questions? Feedback? Recommendations? Drop us a line at eatingnewyork@nymag.com.

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