Italian cuisine has been left out of the top tier in the New York Times’ latest ranking of New York City’s best restaurants. The 2025 edition of the list, compiled by Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark under the editorial direction of Brian Gallagher, reflects a culinary landscape in flux — where Indian, Korean, French, Caribbean, and fusion establishments lead the pack, and Italian names are nowhere to be found among the top ten.
At the top is Semma, a Greenwich Village restaurant specializing in Southern Indian cuisine. It’s followed by Atomix, a modern Korean tasting-menu spot in NoMad, and the iconic French seafood venue Le Bernardin in Midtown.
The rest of the top ten features Kabawa, a Caribbean tasting-menu newcomer in the East Village; Ha’s Snack Bar, a French-Vietnamese wine bar on the Lower East Side; King, a Mediterranean restaurant in the South Village with French, Spanish, and partial Italian influences; Penny, a French-style seafood place in the East Village; Sushi Sho, a high-end omakase in Midtown; Szechuan Mountain House, an East Village Chinese favorite; and Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, which draws on Creole and Caribbean traditions in the Upper West Side.
No Italian restaurants make the cut.
The first Italian entry appears only in the unranked section of the list, where the remaining 90 restaurants are presented alphabetically. There one finds Via Carota, a rustic-style trattoria in the West Village with a distinct New York flair. Others include Una Pizza Napoletana on the Lower East Side, Borgo (a Midtown newcomer), Lilia in Williamsburg, and Torrisi in NoLIta. Italian-American mainstays Randazzo’s Clam Bar (Sheepshead Bay) and Don Peppe (South Ozone Park) are also included, but none cracks the top ten.
The criteria for inclusion, according to the writers, were simple: “Where would you send a friend? Where’s worth the splurge? What spot merits an hourlong subway ride?” The answers tend to reward novelty and cultural cross-pollination—often at the expense of long-established traditions. The chosen restaurants range from Korean tasting menus to Afro-Caribbean fusion, Iranian small plates to bold Franco-Vietnamese experiments.
The list is the result of months of fieldwork. Krishna and Clark began with a long list that included entries from Pete Wells’s 2024 reviews, then visited hundreds of locations across the five boroughs.
“We came home with new (larger) pairs of pants,” they joke. The final selection offers a culinary snapshot of a city in constant motion—restless, layered, exploratory. And for all the deep roots of Italian cuisine in New York, it may no longer be the flavor that defines its future.
