The 9 Must-Visit Restaurants to Try in 2025

Photograph by Jou Jou

It’s already shaping up to be a very good year for anyone who seeks the thrill of experiencing new restaurants. The team behind one of our Best New Restaurants of 2023 is opening an Indian Chinese restaurant in a Los Angeles strip mall, and a Cambodian pop-up with an ardent fan base will move into a brick-and-mortar space in New York’s Crown Heights. While many of these openings come from renowned restaurant vets, first-time restaurateurs in Houston and DC are gearing up to share their Creole and Ghanaian cooking, respectively.

We track restaurant openings year-round in preparation for our annual Best New Restaurants list. In 2025, these nine will present ample opportunities to step out of your neighborhood, try a new cuisine, and dine more expansively.

This list is organized alphabetically by city. The opening dates below are subject to change, so check restaurant websites and Instagram accounts for updates.

Bong

Brooklyn, NY
Opening: Spring

Kreung Cambodia, a Cambodian pop-up with a cult following, is settling into permanent digs with a new name: Bong. Chef Chakriya Un has been sharing her bold Khmer cooking for eight years in various venues around New York and has amassed a loyal audience—so loyal that to open Bong, Un and her partner, Alexander Chaparro, raised over $25,000 through GoFundMe donations. Bong's menu focuses on homestyle Cambodian staples like kuy teav (an aromatic rice noodle soup), somlor machu kreung (a sour and savory beef soup), and Mama Kim's stir-fried lobster. Un plans to expand beyond Khmer staples, exploring the cuisine's vast variety. Many of the harder-to-find ingredients on the menu will be sourced from Un’s family garden in South Carolina.

Augustine’s

Houston, TX
Opening: Summer

Chef Dominick Lee is returning to Houston to open Augustine’s, a “progressive Creole” restaurant in the forthcoming Hotel King David. It’s a homecoming for Lee, who moved to the Space City from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to attend the Art Institute of Houston. The chef spent many years cooking in kitchens like Kiran’s and Poitín Bar & Kitchen. Augustine’s is the confluence of Lee’s Creole heritage, his years cooking in Europe, and his most recent stint as the opening chef at Alligator Pear, a New Orleans–inspired restaurant in New York. The menu celebrates the vibrant melting pot that is Creole cuisine with dishes like blackened speckled trout with shrimp farce and fermented tomato court-bouillon. In the lead-up to Augustine’s summer opening, Lee has hosted preview dinners around the city at restaurants like Navy Blue and Riel.

Schezwan Club

Los Angeles, CA
Opening: Summer

Pijja Palace, restaurateur Avish Naran’s first project, was a no-brainer Best New Restaurant in 2023. We couldn’t resist the chef’s idiosyncratic Indian American sports bar tucked in a Silver Lake strip mall under a Comfort Inn. When Naran announced that he was opening another spot next to Pijja Palace (yes, in that same mall), our ears perked up. Schezwan Club is an Indian Chinese restaurant inspired by restaurants that Naran frequented with his family growing up in Cerritos on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Naran plans to populate his menu with Hakka noodles, chili chicken, steamed momos, Singapore-style chili crab, plus a dozen or more sambals. The atmosphere at Schezwan is more intimate than at Pijja Palace with semiprivate booths, Jali screens, and pointed archways.

Cassis

Milwaukee, WI
Opening: Fall

Husband-wife duo Meghan and Kyle Knall are gearing up to debut Cassis, the much-talked-about follow-up to Birch, their celebrated New American restaurant that spotlights local Midwestern ingredients. Cassis will be an all-day French bistro with that same dedication to the Midwest’s rich regional bounty. Brasserie staples like a croque monsieur and moules frites dominate the menu alongside reimagined classics like oeufs mayonnaise, where the egg yolk is replaced with smoked and piped Wisconsin walleye. The sprawling bistro space, designed in collaboration with Amy Carman Design and Dan Beyer Architects, seats nearly 200 diners and boasts vintage chandeliers, mosaic tilework, and leather banquettes.

Maison Passerelle

New York, NY
Opening: Spring

Star chef Gregory Gourdet is touching down in New York. That’s all we had to hear to get excited about Maison Passerelle, the fine dining restaurant anchoring the first US outpost of French luxury retailer Printemps in the Financial District. Gourdet is a three-time James Beard Award winner, a Top Chef finalist, and the chef-owner of Kann, the lauded Haitian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, that was one of our Best New Restaurants of 2023. For his New York debut, he’ll partner with Kent Hospitality Group as the Culinary Director of this project and oversee its five food and beverage outlets. The food at Maison Passerelle will focus on French classics through the lens of the country’s colonial history. Expect duck confit with West African–inspired spinach stew, a dry-aged New York strip steak rubbed in Haitian coffee and spices, and chicories with lemongrass, Thai chiles, and fish sauce.

Dancerobot

Philadelphia, PA
Opening: Summer

No, Dancerobot isn’t the name of a techno club or the latest AI advancement—it’s chef Jesse Ito’s new ’80s-inflected Japanese izakaya coming to Rittenhouse Square. Ito has spent eight years wowing Philly diners at his highly acclaimed Royal Sushi and Izakaya in Queen Village, where there’s almost never an empty seat. His new spot, which he’ll open with Royal’s longtime executive chef Justin Bacharach, is more casual. The menu will spotlight Japanese comfort food classics like katsu curry, mentaiko pasta, and koji-marinated Wagyu roast beef with shallot dashi gravy and miso mashed potatoes. On the weekends, diners can delight in breakfast sets known as teishoku, house milk bread toast, and bacon, egg, and cheese yaki onigiri. Judging from the neon pink logo and name, Dancerobot projects to be a high-energy, sake-filled party.

Honeysuckle

Philadelphia, PA
Opening: Spring

Honeysuckle, the culinary enterprise from Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, has lived many lives—from pop-up dinners to pandemic takeout to Honeysuckle Provisions, their Afrocentric market-café that opened in September 2022. The Tates recently closed the West Philly storefront, which offered ingredients often sourced locally from Black farmers and daytime take-out items like black-eyed pea scrapple and “Hot Cheetos”–dusted chicken biscuits. An Instagram post teases that they’ll open a full-fledged restaurant in a larger space in the city’s North Broad area with “more seating, more dining options, and even cocktails.”

JouJou

San Francisco, CA
Opening: Spring

JouJou is the next big effort from David Barzelay and Colleen Booth, the duo behind the two-Michelin-starred San Francisco favorite Lazy Bear. The grand old-school French restaurant will take over a 6,000-square-foot space with a glass-enclosed patio, raw bar, and sunken garden. The menu skews French with an emphasis on seafood. There are oysters and frites, salmon almondine with dill beure blanc, shrimp bisque, and bananas Foster. Plus, with a name like JouJou, which means “toy” or “plaything,” Barzelay is promising theatrics like a sand dab dramatically filleted tableside.

Elmina

Washington, DC
Opening: Winter

Eric Adjepong has done it all. He has shared his Ghanaian American cooking on Top Chef and several Food Network shows, has a cookbook publishing in March, and has even penned a children’s book. But Elmina, which opens later this month in DC, is his first restaurant. Elmina celebrates contemporary Ghanaian cuisine from Adjepong’s first-generation upbringing in a setting meant to feel like the capital city of Accra, replete with green-blue tones and accents of gold evoking its coastal locale. The upscale spot will offer both an à la carte and a tasting menu (five courses for $105) with classics like kelewele and fufu, plus new interpretations like a jollof duck pot with three types of duck (confit leg, breast, and egg) and stewed black-eyed peas with crispy sweet plantains.

1/29/25: This article has been updated to reflect up to date information about the opening of Bong. A previous version of this article misstated the name of Bong co-owner Alexander Chaparro.

Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit

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