The 9 Must-Visit New Restaurants of Fall 2024

This is a season of restaurant comebacks. In Detroit and Miami, restaurants are reopening years after closing, while a Los Angeles chef is looking ahead to a new project after shuttering the doors to his beloved Cantonese deli in Chinatown. In New York, Time and Tide will debut as the legacy project of the late Jamal James Kent, with recent Top Chef winner Danny Garcia at the helm.

There’s also a new Caribbean restaurant from the Momofuku team, which departs from the Asian American flavors that defined the once-global restaurant group. We track openings year-round in the lead-up to our annual Best New Restaurants list, and these are the ones we are most excited about this Fall.

Many restaurants have opened in the past month to start the season on a high note. Black Dragon, a new take-out spot in Philadelphia, serves what chef Kurt Evans describes as a fusion of Black American and Chinese flavors; New York’s Kellogg’s Diner has been reimagined with a Tex-Mex spin; Niven Patel opened Paya in Miami, focused on tropical flavors and ingredients; and the team behind Kindred just debuted their new Mediterranean restaurant, Albertine, in Charlotte.

These are Bon Appétit’s nine most anticipated restaurant openings of the season.

This list is organized alphabetically by city. The opening dates below are subject to change. Check restaurant websites and Instagram accounts for the latest updates.

Cantina Rosa

Chicago, IL
Projected opening: November

Cantina Rosa was born from the bar program at Virtue, a restaurant celebrating Southern cuisine by James Beard Award–winning chef-owner Erick Williams. Williams and Virtue general manager Jesus Garcia noticed a demand for cocktails in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood and decided to open a bar just around the corner in a former laundromat space. The name is an homage to the duo’s grandmothers, Rose and Rosa. While Virtue focuses on Southern cooking, Cantina Rosa will spotlight Mexican culture and Garcia’s heritage. Beverage whiz Paul McGee is helping to curate a drinks menu with agave- and sugarcane-derived spirits, bourbon, and charanda. There are drinks like the Jushu, a frozen mezcal-based cocktail with acacia honey, lime, and mango vinegar, or the Royal Hawaiian made with Mexican gin, fresh pineapple, orgeat, and lemon. Bar bites like chicken tamales and refried bean sopes with crema and queso fresco will round out the experience.

Lady of the House

Detroit, MI
Projected opening: October

Kate Williams closed the doors to her lauded restaurant, Lady of the House, in 2021 when the building was sold. Now, the popular Detroit spot is returning. Williams opened the original in 2017 to much acclaim—a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant and Best Chef: Great Lakes, plus a coveted spot on numerous national best new restaurant lists. Williams’s menu will honor her family roots with an ode to Irish hospitality, French influence, and Midwestern background (the chef is a Detroit native). The menu focuses on produce from local suppliers and farms, particularly urban ones in downtown Detroit. Fans can expect the return of many of their old favorites, like toasted rye sourdough with rich shrimp butter, whole roasted chicken with challah migas and lemon rosemary gravy, and potato doughnuts with dried yogurt and chamomile sauce. The new Core City space is meant to feel cozy and welcoming—Williams called on her Instagram followers for well-loved teacups and used china to make the dining room feel like her grandmother’s living room.

Perseid

Houston, TX
Projected opening: December

Chef Aaron Bludorn and his team have had a busy few years in Houston. Coming on the heels of Bar Bludorn earlier this year, Bludorn is opening his fourth restaurant. Perseid is an all-day spot in Hotel Saint Augustine in Houston’s Museum District. Post Company, the design firm behind stylish spots like New York’s Raf’s, created a space full of hand-painted textural murals and ombré-dipped wall treatments. Diners can expect a neighborhood bistro with a distinct Gulf Coast sensibility—dishes like stuffed squash blossoms with jambalaya, shrimp, and celery salad, crawfish sausage with Creole sauce, and blackened grouper with long beans and black garlic hoisin.

Rasarumah

Los Angeles, CA
Projected opening: October

Chef Johnny Lee is teaming up with Last Word Hospitality, the restaurant group behind Los Angeles favorites like Queen St. and Barra Santos, to open Rasarumah in Historic Filipinotown. This is Lee's follow-up to the much-loved Pearl River Deli, where he created a menu of Cantonese comfort food. Fans have awaited the chef’s next move since Pearl River’s closing in February. At Rasarumah, which means “flavor house” in Malay, he’s celebrating Malaysian and Southeast Asian cuisine. Diners can sample satay skewers, Malaysian fried chicken with nasi lemak, and noodle dishes in a checker-floored space meant to feel like the bustling cafés of Penang. Lee will also spotlight lesser-seen dishes like Penang-style char kway teow, a rice noodle dish stir-fried with lard, shrimp, and Chinese sausage, or kueh pie tee, a Peranakan canapé that features a crisp tart shell filled with braised jicama and crab. Last Word Hospitality’s wine director, Evelyn Goreshnik, has curated a selection of sake and soju, as well as beer and wine, to pair with the food.

Gu Grocery

Los Angeles, CA
Projected opening: November

Familiar flavors guide Jess Wang’s baking, but the Los Angeles cook and fermentation expert puts a distinct spin on each of the sticky, chewy sweets she sells alongside her mother, Peggy Lin Wang, at farmers markets and pop-ups throughout the city. Under the name Pique-Nique LA, Wang earned a reputation for her ingenious Chinese- and Taiwanese-accented sweets that take mochi to new heights and often swap out cane sugar for unrefined sweeteners. Her take on a lemon loaf features a butter mochi base decorated with sunny slices of Meyer lemon, and a tender mochi muffin cradles a hefty chunk of supple sweet potato at its center. Local ingredients and the changing seasons inspire Wang’s savory offerings too. She fortifies millet congee with kabocha squash and fills leopard-spotted dough pockets with chives from a nearby Taiwanese farmer. In November, Wang and her mother are slated to open a Chinatown brick-and-mortar called Gu Grocery to bring together their passions. To round out the family affair, her father is overseeing renovations. Once the space opens, there will be a plethora of pickled and prepared grab-and-go options along with more of that soothing congee and, of course, Wang’s signature sweets. —Elazar Sontag, restaurant editor

Sunny’s Steakhouse

Miami, FL
Projected opening: October

At the height of the pandemic, the courtyard at Sunny’s Steakhouse felt like a reincarnation of a classic white tablecloth restaurant. The buzzy Little River spot opened in 2020 and was entirely outdoors, with tableside martini service, a kitchen housed in an exposed cage-like structure, and tables surrounding a massive banyan tree. Sunny’s landed on Bon Appétit’s list of the 50 Best New Restaurants of 2022, the same year it closed for renovations. Two years later business partners Will Thompson and Carey Hynes are reopening Sunny’s as a permanent indoor-outdoor space with 220 seats. There will still be an outdoor brick courtyard replete with that majestic banyan tree and full bar, but diners can now enjoy Sunny’s rain-or-shine in the indoor mid-century modern space. The steakhouse-style menu spans raw bar selections emphasizing local Florida seafood to wood-fired proteins like Wagyu skirt steak (best paired with potato butter or pineapple hot sauce). Diners can also delight in many headliners from the team’s now-closed restaurant, Jaguar Sun, such as housemade pasta like squid ink paccheri with octopus or fluffy Parker House rolls. Don’t miss a pick-your-path martini, a house cocktail like the Jailbreak with coffee-infused rhum, or a seriously good N/A drink to wash it all down.

Time and Tide

New York, NY
Projected opening: October

The newest project from Kent Hospitality Group was always going to be significant. It’s one of several upcoming projects from the restaurant group over the next year, and Time and Tide’s executive chef-partner Danny Garcia won the most recent season of Top Chef. But the restaurant’s opening now also carries the legacy of chef Jamal James Kent after the industry giant’s unexpected death in June. Kent was a mentor to Garcia: They met and worked together at NoMad Restaurant in 2014, and Kent later brought him to Crown Shy in 2018. Kent conceived Time and Tide as a nod to Grand Central Oyster Bar, and Garcia is carrying out this vision of a fish-forward steakhouse with a menu designed around large-format seafood dishes. There will be an oyster pan roast, fluke milanese with shiso and fennel salad, cacio e pepe spear squid, and charred sardine toast with piquillo relish. The drinks menu, designed by bar director Harrison Ginsberg, will similarly channel the ocean, featuring cocktails that incorporate sake, sherry, and seaweed. The design of the 140-seat restaurant on Park Avenue South is inspired by the Long Island shore house of Kent’s childhood.

Bar Kabawa

New York, NY
Projected opening: November

Last November, David Chang closed his era-defining restaurant Momofuku Ko and the adjacent Ko Bar. At the time there was much speculation about what the closure meant for the chef’s rapidly shrinking restaurant group. In November, a new project will pick up the torch. The bar space will debut later this year, and the restaurant will open in 2025—still under the Momofuku umbrella but focusing on Caribbean cooking instead of the decadent Asian and American flavors on which Chang built his career. Barbados native Paul Carmichael will be running the show at Kabawa. In 2015, he became head chef at the now-closed Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney, where his Caribbean cooking received ample praise. He is now also the head of culinary development across the restaurant group. As at Seiobo, Bar Kabawa will celebrate the food of the West Indies. The Momofuku empire has four remaining restaurants after a series of closures in recent years, but with Carmichael in command, Bar Kabawa is poised to be a bright spot that could light a new era.

Judith

Sewanee, TN
Projected opening: November

Julia Sullivan is known in the Nashville dining scene for her seasonal American cooking at Henrietta Red. Now the chef is headed about 90 miles southeast to Sewanee, Tennessee, for her first solo endeavor. The James Beard semifinalist will open Judith near the University of the South this fall. The restaurant is named after the first woman to matriculate at the university and sits in the school’s Old Steam Laundry building. Diners will be able to sample hearty dishes like pork coppa with sauerkraut and finish the meal with profiteroles with soft-serve in flavors like honeycomb and pistachio. Henrietta Red’s beverage manager, Patrick Halloran, has come on board to create a list of wine, cocktails, and spirits to complement the tavern-style food.