There are more than 17,000 restaurants in New York City, so it takes something special to stand out. You could narrow down the findings by choosing the 13 best spots in Chinatown, the best celebrity-owned restaurants, or five affordable Michelin-starred restaurants. As December approaches, restaurant reviewers go over their notes about all the meals they had during the course of the entire year and come up with their picks for the best new ones. Not only did a little hole-in-the-wall French-Vietnamese spot called Ha’s Snack Bar make the list of 2025’s best new restaurants in New York City published by The New York Times and The Infatuation, but it’s also on Bon Appétit’s list of the 20 best new restaurants in America (and the only one in New York). What is the cause for all these accolades? When The New York Times writes that the husband-and-wife restaurateurs have a “singular, game-changing talent,” you know that their Lower East Side eatery will be buzzy and nearly impossible to book.
Anthony Ha and Sadie-Mae Burns-Ha aren’t new to the restaurant world. They met while cooking at another small, hot, inventive New York City restaurant, Mission Chinese Food, in 2015. In 2019, they opened their own spot, a moveable pop-up called Ha’s Đặc Biệt, itself buzzy and showing up across New York City as well as in places like London and Paris. Ha is behind the portable cooktops (not even a proper stove) in the miniscule kitchen, and Burns-Ha oversees the front-of-house operations.
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How to get in and what to order
The interior of Ha’s Snack Bar – NurigoNY
Unlike their pop-up restaurant, Ha’s Snack Bar has a fixed address: 297 Broome Street at Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It doesn’t have a website or a phone number or its own social media. (The Instagram account for Ha’s Đặc Biệt, which has 66,000 followers at the time of this writing, also shares information about Ha’s Snack Bar.) What the restaurant does have is a way to book, through Resy. However, reservations disappear nearly instantaneously as the restaurant can only hold 24 people. The Infatuation speculates that reservations are released 20 days in advance and says that Ha’s takes walk-ins. They suggest arriving before 5 p.m. and waiting in line to be in the first seating when it opens at 5:30.
The menu changes every day and isn’t posted online. Instead, it’s written on a chalkboard inside the restaurant. There are some fan favorites that get great reviews and frequently show up on the menu like oysters with green chili, snails with garlic and tamarind butter, and chicken liver pâté embellished with chili, cilantro, and raisin agrodolce. Reviewers have lauded the pastry produced by Burns-Ha, whether it comes in a savory dish like black pudding tartlet with pickled kumquats or a dessert like a tamarind-sour rhubarb jam tart. Diners are packed in and seated on uncomfortable stools as Ha’s was created as a snack bar — “somewhere to stop along the way and have drinks and small bits [sic],” per their Instagram account.
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Read the original article on Islands.