The NoMad Bar.   (Photo: Dina Litovsky)

In restaurants, as in life, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so it occurred to your humble critic the other evening, as I tucked a linen napkin into my frayed collar and peered woozily at yet another mortarboard-thick menu inscribed in flowery script with formerly passé but now suddenly fashionable delicacies like pan-roasted foie gras, duck à l’orange, and “toro with caviar on housemade brioche.” Sure, the culinary landscape is still scattered with buzzy noodle bars and tiny ­Greenmarket-­centric tasting rooms, but as the fortunes of the one percent continue to boom, the exotic old delicacies that were out of style during the spare, recessionary years are back in vogue. As we flip the calendar on a new dining year, Brooklyn is inexplicably out as the city’s premier dining destination, veggies are in, and, in the perpetually trendy realm of comfort-food cooking, chefs are focusing their creative energies on familiar ye-olde-­breakfast dishes like pickled herring, potato latkes, and even wonton soup. Several superstar chefs who made their reputations in the dim dark ages of the last millennium are making stirring, improbable comebacks, and a handful of the city’s new Asian-­influenced restaurants are producing the kind of elaborate fusion recipes that used to be popular back in 1992.

We’ve dutifully catalogued all of these strange and unexpected events in this, New York Magazine’s annual roundup of everything that’s interesting, new, and delicious to eat in the upper realms of this food-obsessed capital of the USA. In the following pages, you will find the usual avalanche of personal, highly subjective tips and judgments gathered over many meals in countless chophouses, cocktail joints, and obscure ramen bars. Where can you procure the finest pork sandwich in Williamsburg? We have that intelligence for you, along with the best new lunchtime burger in the Flatiron District, where to stop in for a quick whiskey-pecan babka while wandering the streets of Tribeca, and the subterranean spot to take your friends for a slap-up midnight feast of New Age Peking duck. As usual, we’ve listed a few big-city-dining trends that were exciting once but now drive us to distraction. Are you weary of accomplished chefs prattling on about their last foraging trip to Scandinavia? So are we. And, as is also customary for critics this time of year, we’ve compiled our annual lists of everything we love about eating in New York City, including ones featuring the up-and-coming young chefs whose cooking we admire and the new restaurants where we’d be happy to return for a second (or even third) meal, provided we could gather the necessary funds.