u/anax44

95) A&A Bake and Doubles

For $2.50 each, doubles just as you want them: baras fluffy and channa chickpeas sweet-hot, musky and messy, with all the sauces.

1337 Fulton Street, Bedford-Stuyvesant

91) Cas West Indian & American Restaurant

This bare-bones Jamaican spot has loaves of Golden Krust on the shelf and freshly made pepper shrimp packed in plastic bags (the traditional way), but you’re here for the oxtail, the gravy dark and luscious, worth eating just for the inky imprint on the rice alone.

135 Kingston Avenue, Crown Heights

88) Trinciti Roti Shop

The wait for the A train to Ozone Park can stretch as long as 20 minutes, and then it’s another half-mile walk from the station. But what is time when you could be eating Trinciti’s buss up shut, a roti as a big as a shirt? The dough is rolled and wrapped and rolled again, with gobs of butter and ghee and a final brushing of oil on the grill. It comes out skinny as a kerchief, but has all the flaky richness of a Southern biscuit, with so many folds that however much I ate of it, there was still more.

111-03 Lefferts Boulevard, South Ozone Park

87) 188 Bakery Cuchifritos

Frying is an art, perhaps plied nowhere with such efficiency and aplomb as at this lively lunch counter, where the very air seems to crackle and the scent of pork incites the blood. The multigenerational Fordham Heights crowd assures you that this is the place to be.

158 East 188th Street, Fordham Heights

75) Maison Passerelle

There’s a subversive edge to this otherwise blithe simulacrum of a French salon inside the Printemps department store, with its frescoes, Languedoc marble tables and banquettes clad in Le Manach toile de Tours. The chef Gregory Gourdet, the son of Haitian immigrants, approaches France from the view of the colonies, moving from Vietnam to Louisiana but ever circling back to the Caribbean and its wealth of plantains, salt cod, Scotch bonnets, pikliz and not-so-humble rice and beans.

1 Wall Street, Financial District

72) Kingston Tropical

Since 1970, this takeout spot has been obliging Wakefield with Jamaican patties done by the book. Marigold yellow, faithfully crimped and perfumed with thyme, they are flaky without collapsing. The beef is juicy, but the chicken is even better, especially when eaten while sitting on a concrete slab as the No. 2 train thunders overhead. Give thanks to John Levi, who founded the bakery with his wife, Joyce, and who died just a few months ago.

4000 White Plains Road, Wakefield

58) Hellbender

The neon-hued jaguar on the wall sets the tone. The chef Yara Herrera’s cooking is at once feral and precise, and brings to radiant life her Mexican American childhood in Los Angeles, with touches of salsa macha, as crunchy and dark as chile crisp; cilantro macho, thicker-stalked and punchier than its cousin; and sikil pak, a Yucatecan dip of pepitas, habaneros and tomatoes charred until they sweat smoke.

68-22 Forest Avenue, Ridgewood

42) Ajo y Orégano

This may be the city’s most ebullient dining room, with pink shutters on palm-green walls and food served in metal pots under painted lids. The stews are thick, slow-moving and heavy, and soon you are, too. Cuerito, the crackly skin of pernil (slow-roasted pork), has a crunch loud enough to ricochet through your skull. Mofongo evokes a fountain of shrimp, tails flaring from a goblet of mashed plantains as a sauce tasting of whole heads of garlic drips down the sides.

1556 White Plains Road (and one other), Parkchester

12) Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi

When Tatiana opened at Lincoln Center in 2022, Kwame Onwuachi took us on a tour of New York — its bodegas, dumpling counters and chain-link lots — and blew our minds with chopped cheese, but make it aged rib-eye, and xiao long bao that spilled forth egusi (Nigerian melon-seed stew). The restaurant remains a hymn to the city as he lives it. Scrappy, risky and, even when it’s a little jagged at the edges, beautiful.

10 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side

1) Kabawa

There are excellent restaurants, and then there are restaurants that have the power to make us see things anew. Kabawa’s prix-fixe menu is full of gutsy pleasures and flauntings of sorrel powder, tamarind, allspice and Scotch bonnets. But the chef Paul Carmichael, who grew up in Barbados, also has something to say about Caribbean cuisine, long excluded from dining’s upper ranks, and food as a through line in the African diaspora, a point of solidarity sustained under colonization and disenfranchisement. None of this is heavy-handed. The mood is effervescent; you are here to salute life. “Luv yuh self,” the menu urges. And on any given night, you’re just as likely to find Mr. Carmichael slinging goat patties at the more informal Bar Kabawa next door, because he understands that the small joys matter, too.

8 Extra Place, East Village