The 9 Restaurant Dishes Food Editors Can’t Stop Thinking About Right Now
Food editors eat for work, so it takes a lot for one plate to linger in the mind after the menu is gone. But after more than 100 restaurant visits in September, Food & Wine’s team narrowed its favorites to nine dishes: a crispy kale chaat in Asheville, a hot dog wrapped in puff pastry in Manhattan, a steaming lamb biryani that fogged up a phone camera and more. This isn’t a ranking of the “best restaurants” in America; it is a deliciously specific snapshot of the dishes editors couldn’t shake.
The Crispy, Crunchy Standouts
At Chai Pani in Asheville, North Carolina, Food & Wine social media editor Andee Gosnell made an exception to her usual one-fried-dish limit. She ordered the kale pakora chaat after chef Meherwan Irani’s okra fries had already arrived at the table, and the dish won her over with crisp kale, cooling yogurt, tamarind chutney, and red onion. “I usually don’t order a second fried dish, but this one felt like a breath of fresh air,” Gosnell wrote.
The dish’s strength is its balance. Fried kale has crunch, but the tart yogurt and sweet-sour tamarind keep it from becoming a one-note snack; red onion adds another sharp, fresh element. Chai Pani’s version is one of several dishes on the list that use contrasting textures as the main event, rather than treating crunch as a garnish. It also reminds us that a plate can be rich and lively at the same time.
Boon Choo Thai Kitchen in Sharon, Massachusetts, delivered another editor-approved fried favorite: crispy eggplant. Writer Priyanka Shahane described the Japanese eggplant as split, battered, and fried “until devastatingly crisp,” then served in a sweet-and-spicy vegan seafood sauce. The eggplant is listed on a paper addendum to the main menu, but Shahane called it “nothing short of a showstopper” once it reached the table.
The sauce gives the dish its personality. Palm sugar lends earthy sweetness, while lime juice and garlic deliver sharper notes; crispy shallots, fresh herbs, Fresno peppers and chopped peanuts make every bite more layered. Shahane wrote that her table fought over the garnishes, then used other pieces of the meal to mop up the remaining sauce. That is the kind of plate food editors remember: a dish that creates its own small competition at the table.
In Ipswich, Massachusetts, Food & Wine restaurant editor Erika Adams found a late-summer classic done with enough precision to become a new Labor Day tradition: fried clams at The Clam Box. The whole-belly clams are washed in evaporated milk, coated in pastry and corn flour, then fried until they have a craggy, crunchy shell without becoming weighed down with oil. Adams wrote that she expected the familiar New England genre, but “wasn’t prepared to fall quite so hard for this particular rendition.”
The Dishes With a Twist
Milady’s in New York City wins the month’s most playful entry with its hot dog Wellington. Chef Sam Sherman, who leads Milady’s and Clover Club, had recently put the bite-sized dish on the menu when senior photo editor Doan Nguyen stopped in for dinner. The little Wellingtons were “perfectly crisp on the outside,” Nguyen wrote, adding, “I could have eaten a dozen.” It is a familiar hot dog reimagined in a format associated with a far more formal centerpiece.
Nguyen also singled out the porchetta sandwich at Ends Meat in Brooklyn, which layers crispy-skinned porchetta with paper-thin red onion, spicy peppers and watercress. He called it ideal with a cold beer at the Industry City butcher and kitchen, then delivered the kind of endorsement no menu description could improve: “If any of this sandwich gets stuck in my teeth, that’s perfectly alright since I would love to taste it again later.”
In Philadelphia, updates writer Nick DeSimone found his favorite bite during a bakery crawl at Majdal Bakery: the kashkawan safeha. The flatbread is fluffy and chewy, rolled in sesame and nigella seeds, and topped with kashkawan cheese, herbed labneh and hot honey. DeSimone wrote that the salty cheese, honey, and browned sesame seeds stayed with him long after the group’s crawl ended. “I won’t turn down any combination of bread and cheese,” he wrote, “but I will bus across town for this safeha again and again.”
The list’s most elegant small bite came from Caviar Dream, the first Black-owned caviar brand in the U.S.Special projects editor Lucy Simon tried American paddlefish roe served on a buttermilk biscuit with pimiento cheese. She described the roe as silky and briny with a gentle pop, and called the bite “an homage to all things Southern.” The combination landed because it united rich, tangy cheese with salty caviar instead of asking either ingredient to do all the work alone.
Related: 10 Restaurant-Worthy Dishes Chefs Are Bringing Home, and Yes, You Can Actually Make Them
The Plates Built to Linger
At Mirra in New York City, updates editor Molly McArdle encountered a lamb barbacoa biryani made by Chicago chefs Zubair Mohajir and Rishi Kumar. Mirra combines culinary influences and ingredients from India and Mexico, and its lamb biryani followed that cross-cultural approach with shredded lamb barbacoa over basmati rice, caramelized onions, and black and white sesame seeds. Mohajir and Kumar were in New York for a Chicago Tourism Board dinner shortly before being named Food & Wine’s October cover stars and 2026 Best New Chefs.
McArdle’s description explains why this dish made the list. She called it a “spice-cabinet fever dream” and wrote that steam from the biryani fogged both her glasses and her smartphone camera. The phrase captures the dish’s power without reducing it to a trend: the attraction was the fragrance, the tender lamb, the deeply caramelized onions and the drama of lifting into a bowl of hot rice. It was not merely photogenic; it announced itself before the first bite.
At Ambassadors Clubhouse in New York, senior editor Karla Alindahao could not stop thinking about beetroot raj kachori chaat. The crisp semolina shell holds tandoori beets, lentil sprouts, masala yogurt and tamarind, making the dish at once crunchy and creamy, sweet and savory. “It’s messy, wildly textural, and exactly the kind of dish I can’t stop thinking about,” Alindahao wrote. In other words, it is designed for the kind of joyful, hands-on eating that makes an order memorable.
What connects these nine plates is not a single cuisine, city or level of fanciness. Food & Wine’s editors highlighted a range that runs from a Massachusetts clam shack to a Manhattan bar, an Asheville Indian street-food restaurant to a Philadelphia bakery. What they kept returning to, however, was contrast: fried foods brightened with tangy sauces, cheese sharpened with honey, rich rice lifted by spices, and familiar ideas presented in a new form.
The takeaway for hungry diners is not that every meal needs caviar or a road trip. It is that the dishes worth talking about tend to be specific about what they are trying to do. A hot dog becomes a Wellington; eggplant gets an audibly crisp crust; a biscuit becomes a vehicle for pimiento cheese and roe. If you are planning a restaurant outing this month, these editors have already supplied a useful rule: order the thing that sounds a little unexpected, and be ready to think about it long after the check arrives.
