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Moments after wrapping 2023 and celebrating its very best restaurants, the new year is blazing ahead with all the anticipation and intrigue preceding 2024’s eventual list. Will we, 11 months from now, be feting one of the below incoming spots? Will a late-arriving candidate dazzle in December to rattle the whole landscape? Or will some plucky, independent upstart quietly emerge to embody the hospitality zeitgeist while the major players fail to connect? I already know, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so here are this moment’s most exciting upcoming openings.
Saga Hospitality Group’s latest
Flatiron
Projected opening date: Fall
Chef James Kent has been dazzling downtown since he first opened pristine Crown Shy—FiDi’s premier destination for clicking your heels across a marble floor—in 2019. His next act was splendid Saga, where the prices are as expansive as the skyline views from the 63rd story above NYC. Kent’s next chapter opens up on Park Avenue South at 26th Street this fall. Expect 120 seats in the main dining room, plus a barroom and private space that all spans 7,000 square feet. It’s planned to operate as a bakery by day with seafood-centric menus in the evening.
Chez Fifi
Upper East Side
Projected opening date: April/May
Sushi Noz is known as one of the city’s top sushi spots with even higher prices. Why, simply try to identify its prices on its own website, it cannot be done. (The omakase menu is $500 per person before drinks, tax or tip.) This spring, the group eschews sushi for French fare served across two floors of a neighborhood townhouse with room for 40. Expect rich hues, plush banquettes, vintage chandeliers and a fireplace in a space intended to evoke Paris in the 1930s.
Bánh by Lauren
Two Bridges
Projected opening date: Spring
Lauren Tran’s Vietnamese-American and French Pastry operation has been one to watch since it first began as a moveable feast in 2020, and this year it gets its own brick-and-mortar shop in Manhattan.
San Sabino
West Village
Projected opening date: Soon
As it sometimes goes, the next venture from the team behind perennially popular Don Angie also appeared on our fall preview. Four months later, San Sabino can only be closer to opening with even more Italian-American items, this time with a focus on seafood, to further fortify the burgeoning empire.
Wayward Kitchen
Prospect Heights
Projected opening date: March
Michelin Bibbed Alta Calidad gets a next-door sibling with 60-seat Wayward Kitchen. It promises items like merguez popovers, oven-baked duck eggs, roasted sardines and Basque fish stew with plenty getting a turn in the wood-burning oven.
Demo
West Village
Projected opening date: January
Chef Quang Nguyen, previously of highly-regarded Wildair, will bring French and Mediterranean-inspired cuisine to Carmine Street in the coming weeks. The pre-opening menu includes lengua tonnata, grilled squid, steak, a half chicken and lobster au poivre.