17 Restaurants Where New Yorkers Can Make Up for Lost Time

Spring blossoms and vaccinations are bringing the city out of hibernation. Pete Wells shares his favorite places that opened while many of us were staying home.

As spring takes hold, the sidewalks of New York are filling with people. Their bodies are loaded with vaccine-induced antibodies, and their heads are throbbing with an urge to enjoy city life again. The restaurant business staggered, but never stopped, and if you spent the past year cooking at home you’d be surprised how many new places have sprung up. Here are some of my favorites, all opened during or just before the pandemic, and all offering outdoor seating. I reviewed five of them last year, when I wasn’t convinced anyone was paying attention. The others I checked out and enjoyed, but decided to save in my back pocket for the right moment. Here they are now. If you have fixed ideas about how a dim sum restaurant should look — waiters trundling steel carts between round tables big enough to seat the Yankees’ starting lineup, and so on — forget them. AweSum DimSum is trying to fast-casualize the genre. You order your har gow and siu mai at a counter in the back of the concrete-and-blond-wood dining area. Then you carry your tray, stacked with bamboo steamer baskets, to one of the small tables nearby or outside on 23rd Street. Each basket is big enough to hold three or four dumplings, their fillings showing through the taut, translucent wrappers like saltwater taffy. The rest of the menu isn’t as awesome, but the dumplings are small marvels that outclass the ones at some celebrated Chinatown banquet halls. Although the graffiti-style sign over the door advertises “Palestinian Street Food,” there is more riveting hummus and falafel elsewhere in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, like the superb Al-Aqsa Bakery & Restaurant on Fifth Avenue. Where Ayat excels is in the more complicated dishes of the Levantine home-cooking canon. Kousa are small Persian squash hollowed out and filled up again with rice and onions. Mussakhan piles sumac chicken and fried onions over a pillow of bread that serves as a plate and then as a second course. Mansaf is a deep-dish amalgam of yellow rice, lamb stew, toasted almonds and spiced saj, a crepe-thin flatbread made over a domed griddle in the front window. All the meat is halal and comes from small regional farms that also supply an eastern Mediterranean grocery store across the street that shares an owner with Ayat.