A neo-retro Lower East Sider who menu is built on house-ground meatballs.

The Roman restaurant Testaccio, in Long Island City, breaks the midpriced-Italian mold.

Bread and Butter serves approximately Southern food to people eager for value in Brooklyn Heights.

The maddening menu at Roman’s in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, distracts from the clean, almost monastically pure cooking.

Xi’an Famous Foods in Flushing’s Golden Mall has opened in Manhattan, one of the few non-Cantonese, non-Fujianese places in Chinatown.

Corn tacos, authentic to a Mexico of the mind, are the best item on the menu at this large new restaurant on the Upper East Side.

Two sleek new bars come from illustrious food families: Ardesia, descended from Le Bernardin; and Bar Pleiades, from Daniel Boulud.

Vodka may be the best thing about this new Russian restaurant in the space that used to be, years ago, Silver Swan.

This new Caribbean takeout restaurant is in a neighborhood filled with them, but it’s worth a detour.

A grandmotherly new Chelsea restaurant from the team behind the Lower East Side’s almost-Southern, almost-beloved Little Giant.

This trim Turkish bakery and cafe — like its four-year-old sibling in Brooklyn, it’s an outpost of a company in Istanbul — has all the makings of a proper meal.

The fries aren’t bad at this hot spot in the meatpacking district, but the burger is deeply uninteresting.

At Prime Meats, in Carroll Gardens, the menu is currently small but it delivers.

The original Yerba Buena is a restaurant with good cocktails; Yerba Buena Perry is a seductive cocktail bar with a restaurant in the back.

A former lobsterman from Maine has opened a lobster-roll joint in the East Village with a minimalist menu and décor to match.

Cowgirl SeaHorse isn’t a great restaurant. But like its mother, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, it’s open and fun.

Joseph Leonard may become as adept at feeding its Greenwich Village clientele as it has been at gauging their taste in antiques.

Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope, Brooklyn, grinds pork shoulder and shank, and beef shoulder, into a snappy-skinned Austrian-style dog.

Stumptown Coffee Roasters, which opened in the Ace Hotel earlier this month, puts a polish on the fanaticism of what’s known as coffee’s “Third Wave.”

M & T Restaurant in Flushing features the distinctly simple cuisine of the Chinese city of Qingdao.