Step Inside the Best-Designed New Restaurants

Andrew Knowlton and Julia Kramer spent (collective) months on the road in search of the Hot 10: America’s Best New Restaurants. These are the best things they ate and drank along the way.
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Doug Friedman

There are well-designed restaurants, and then there are restaurants that are such fully realized worlds, they transport you. Those are the ones we want to go back to again and again.

Best Designed Restaurant of the Year: Leo’s Oyster Bar
San Francisco

There are no bad seats or unflattering angles at this gorgeous oyster bar. Instead, there’s just you, your date, two glasses of Champagne, and a universe of rose-colored onyx bartops, vintage glassware, shell-shaped wall sconces, and tropical palm wallpaper. It’s a Mad Men set you get to drink in.

The Runners Up:

Photo by Skandia Shafer

Winsome
Los Angeles

They don’t make ’em much cuter than this all-day café in Echo Park, with its painterly wall mural inspired by Phil Dike’s 1938 watercolor Sunshine in Echo Park, midcentury-style cane chairs, and the most important detail: a vegetable-heavy menu we want to come back for every week.


Mark Hug, courtesy of Restoration Hardware

3 Arts Club Café
Chicago

Never have we ever even considered eating in a Restoration Hardware. And then we walked into this place, a remodeled building named for the women’s club that occupied it for almost a century. At the center of the tree-filled atrium, an opulent chandelier dangles over a grandiose fountain, as luxurious a setting for a bacon club sandwich as there ever was.


Franck Bohbot

N7
New Orleans

At this hidden New Orleans-via-Paris café, you’re not a customer; you’re an extra in a Truffaut film. And you’re drinking natural wines and eating tinned seafood, surrounded by gallery posters and a 1972 Citroen. And you never want to leave.


Josh Dickinson

Tilda All Day
NYC

Few restaurants sum up the brighter, lighter restaurant-design trajectory of 2016 as strongly as Tilda, which the design firm MP Shift outfitted in a clean graphic prints, lots of white tile, gold and brass accents, and cheerful plants.