10 Favorite Restaurants From A Food And Travel Writer In 2024

After reading too many restaurant obituaries during the pandemic years, it seemed like a good time to write restaurant love letters instead. Now that the fine dining world—and the fun dining one as well—is back in action, and more innovative, more ideas-driven and just plain more enjoyable than ever, it’s easier than ever to fall in love. And to write more letters of praise.

These ten restaurants (in alphabetical order) won me over this past year. Some serve dishes based on the owners’ grandparents’ recipes; others are unabashedly contemporary. Some are homecomings, while others are showplaces far from their chefs’ native lands. They all embody the idea behind the word restaurant—to restore, to care for, to welcome and make feel whole.

Atelier Moessmer, Brunico, Italy

Norbert Niederkofler likes to brag that he’s the only chef in Italy who doesn’t cook with olive oil or lemon. Instead, he’s out to “Cook the Mountain”—the title of his cookbook and also his slogan—using only the ingredients of his native Dolomites and techniques more in line with a grandmother’s home a century ago than a three-star kitchen (including his own) a decade ago. Atelier Moessmer occupies an 1890 villa near the chef’s home in Brunico. The kitchen fills a sleek glass cube that was built as an extension, and it’s home to the best seats in the house. Twelve diners at a time perch on barstools around the open kitchen led by executive chef Mauro Siega, where chefs cook proteins over an open fire and work from a mise en place of aged, fermented and otherwise preserved ingredients. Siega notes that only 10% of products that come in are used right away; the rest is prepared to be used months later. The result is a menu that teems with color and flavor, even in the middle of the snowy Alpine winter.

Ayla, Maçakızı, Bodrum

The effortlessly cool Maçakızı put Bodrum on the boho-luxe travel map several decades ago, and its gastronomy has always been strong—strong enough to earn it one of the first Turkish Michelin stars awarded outside of Istanbul last year. But the hotel reached a new level of culinary excellence in 2024 with the arrival of Ayla, a dining “room” of just six tables on a covered platform on a hillside above the bay. The name is an homage to Ayla Emiroğlu, the founder of the 1970s incarnation of Maçakızı and the mother of its present owner. The menu is a love letter to the Turkish kitchen, written by chef Aret Sahakyan, who has been the hotel’s culinary soul since the beginning. It’s a tasting menu without all the fuss, just four official courses (plus the usual snacks and surprises inherent to fine dining), and with room for diners to make choices. My dinner included dishes like tuna tartare with pastırma (highly seasoned air-dried cured beef) and pickled blueberry sorbet, and blue crab with iç pilav (rice pilaf with pine nuts and currants) and zucchini blossoms. And the kaymak (clotted cream) ice cream topped with caviar was my favorite dessert of the year.

Casa Gadanha, Estremoz, Portugal

Local old-timers didn’t know quite what to make of Casa Gadanha when it opened in the white city of Estremoz a couple years ago. It’s definitely not a typical Alentejo canteen, the kind of place that serves huge plates of rustic comfort food. Casa Gadanha isn’t fine dining either, but its chef, Ruben Trindade Santos, brings the best of that world to his casual dining room and small plates menu. He worked in some of Portugal’s top kitchens, including Feitoria in Lisbon and Ocean in the Algarve, before embarking on an eating and cooking tour of South America. The journey led him to design an inventive menu of international ideas made with local ingredients; over the summer, a tasting menu included the likes of tzatziki straciatella, melon and Iberian pork ham; Azorean amberjack with carrot and orange aguachile; and eggplant with honey, labneh and chimichurri. There’s also wood oven for pizzas and excellent long-fermentation bread.

Dar Tazi, Palais De Fes, Morocco

One of the loveliest places to stay in Fez, Palais de Fes got its start as the city’s first modern-day restaurant, back in 1980—photos of the original owner with Ronald Reagan and Middle Eastern royals still hang on the walls. His children are carrying on that legacy, transforming the hotel into a world-class place to stay, but they’re keeping the kitchen at the heart of it. Even when I arrived sometime after midnight, they offered a “light” meal as a welcome: a table covered in Moroccan salads—spiced carrots, smashed eggplant, garlicky green peppers—followed by a vegetable tagine that had been simmering for hours. It’s not just the quantity that impresses. It’s the quality, and also the care. Ghita Tazi says they’re still serving food “as our grandmothers would serve it,” often made by cooks who have worked there for nearly 40 years.

Ekstedt, Stockholm

Everyone is cooking with fire now, but Niklas Ekstedt was the one who lit the flame in the fine dining world. At his namesake restaurant in Stockholm, the Swedish chef is both a purist and an experimenter, working in a kitchen with no gas or electricity and using cooking implements that were (or could have been) made a century ago or more. And although his team, led by chef de cuisine Florencia Abella, sets birch, hay, seaweed, juniper and charcoal aflame, he insists that his is not a fire restaurant but a technique-driven restaurant that happens to work with fire. In any case, he pours over antique cookbooks and scours markets for old stoves, smokers, fire cones and bellows, then uses them to prepare a 15-course menu of dishes like hay-flamed pike perch, white asparagus and cured duck, and charcoal-fired spring lamb saddle, ember-baked potato and ramson (wild garlic). Describing the bread and butter course alone takes two paragraphs, but the massive amount of the work is arguably the point, and Abella says the same recipes tasted totally different when they tried them in a modern kitchen.

El Camino, Palma, Mallorca

“Celebrating simplicity” is the tagline for this institution in the center of Palma’s old town. El Camino is a place where diners sit elbow to elbow at a long marble-topped bar in front of an open kitchen. The daily menu is printed on the paper placemats, which get ringed with wineglass stains or speckled with drops of the olive oil that’s served with the bread. The menu of sharable plates is a collection of elemental pleasures: sizzling padrón peppers, acorn-fed Iberian ham, salted cod fritters, omelets with blue cheese or chorizo, quail with escabeche, and terrific fresh-caught seafood like grilled octopus with mojo rojo (red sauce) and tuna tartare. A long list of Mallorca wines, most of them offered by the glass, adds to the strong sense of place.

Feitoria, Lisbon

Lisbon has other, flashier fine dining restaurants, but a return visit to Feitoria this summer won me over with its restrained creativity. It’s inventive, sure, but never merely for the sake of being so, and the presentations are beautiful while still being easy to eat. Chef André Cruz became part of the restaurant’s original team in 2009 at the age of 21, went on a gastronomic adventure through South America (with Casa Gadanha’s Trindade, in fact), returned to Feitoria as sous-chef in 2015, and took over the head role a couple of years ago. It’s a journey that led him to a masterful command of Portuguese ingredients and culinary ideas, as seen in six- and eight-course tasting menus (with vegetarian versions of each) with dishes like “cozido do mar”—stew from the sea, a pescatarian play on a famously meat-heavy typical dish—finished with algae and caviar.

Mikuriya, The Dolder Grand, Zurich

The name Mikuriya means “kitchen where food is prepared for special guests,” and that’s almost right. The intimate eight-seat omakase restaurant, tucked away in a discreet room on the fourth floor of the grand hotel, certainly makes guests feel special, but it doesn’t have a kitchen. Rather, Japanese chef Atsushi Hiraoka works behind the dining counter, preparing a series of delicate dishes, based somewhat on raw fish but also using luxurious ingredients like king crab, black truffles, white strawberries, and wagyu that’s simmered tableside in sukiyaki style. It’s hard not to love opulent bites like the bluefin tuna nigiri that’s topped with caviar, but even relatively humble dishes—like the deep fried tofu that’s served with dashi bullion, or the red bean ice cream and matcha mochi that cap off the meal—are prepared with a precision that makes them a delight to receive.

Rohet Garh, Rajasthan, India

The flagship of Rajasthan’s stylish House of Rohet hotels, Rohet Garh is the ancestral home of the noble family behind the brand. Since 1989 it’s been classified as a Heritage Hotel—a high honor in India—and it makes perfect sense that it was used to house the cast and crew while Wes Anderson filmed The Darjeeling Limited nearby. The place is cinematic as all get-out, all Mughal architecture, lavish silks, elephant carvings and peacocks strutting the grounds. It has also maintained a strong commitment to tradition and quality in its kitchen, where the chefs were trained by the former lady of the house, the late Thakurani Sahiba. Her recipes were so popular she collected them into cookbooks and her descendants offer them to guests. A simple thali of Rajasthani curries, dals and roti was a highlight of a two-week trip through India.

Tohru In Der Schreiberei, Munich

Chef Tohru Nakamura says that when German diners try his food, they think of it as Japanese, but when Japanese visitors taste it, they notice the Germanness. In fact, he’s made his namesake restaurant a testament to his own German-Japanese heritage—as he says, growing up in a house where the miso shared refrigerator space with the mustard—and a reflection of his culinary journey through both food cultures. It’s an unlikely combination but a winning one, a fusion of Central European flavors with the essence of kaiseki philosophy. While individual dishes impress—chawanmushi with Burguny truffle, cauliflower and duck ham, or carabinero with Norway lobster, crevettes (small shrimp) and kimizu (Japanese golden sauce)—it’s the overall progression of the ten-course menu that makes Tohru a standout in the global culinary landscape.

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