It’s that time of year, when a food writer looks back on a sea of empty plates and thinks about what was once on them.

In my case, as food editor at Bloomberg Pursuits, the big and small plates represent hundreds of meals across the globe and more calories than anyone wants to think about.

A best dish retrospective is also a good opportunity to look through the crumbs for food trends from the past year. I found a lot of my favorite dishes at restaurants that double as wine bars. In London, where I’m based and ate the majority of my meals, it’s a popular model. That’s in part because of a wine bar’s flexibility: You can have food, you can have a glass, and there’s generally a fair amount of leeway for walk-ins so you don’t have to plan ahead. And at places such as Camille in London’s Borough Market and Morchella in Clerkenwell, the food is invariably excellent. Likewise, at Mountain in Soho, it’s hard to make a bad choice on chef Tomos Perry’s menu, which is a couple dozen items long. The walls and windows are lined with empty bottles of wine, and the counter seats are made for having a glass (or glasses) of wine with some plates—just make sure you get the cured dairy beef (see below).

Its also been a good year to watch chefs reinvent classics; the allure of clever comfort food is unstoppable. The hip tapas bar Tollingtons, in North London, smartly uses chips (that is, superchunky fries) instead of patatas for its iconic Spanish bravas snack. At the downtown New York dining room the Otter, an inches-high swordfish replaces the beef in an incredible au poivre entree and looks far more impressive than a plain piece of steak.

One place I didn’t spend a lot of time at in 2024 was a fine-dining restaurant. The death of multicourse, multihour dining rooms has been an incessant refrain, and it’s easy to believe the hype when you’re sitting at a wine bar with a delicious snack in front of you. But then at the end of the year, I traveled to Kyoto. There, I had a pair of miraculous meals that made me think, yes, sometimes it is worth traveling halfway around the world to taste a dish that required the work of a dozen or so chefs. Let’s see where that takes me in 2025.

London

Kottu Roti With Brown Crab Curry, Rambutan“Kottu roti is maybe the most beloved of Sri Lanka’s street food dishes,” proclaims Cynthia Shanmugalingam about the stir-fry at her Borough Market joint that features the food of the South Asia island. Here she takes a multifaceted creamy crab curry, her grandmother’s recipe, and tasty Dorset brown crab; it’s heavy on coconut milk and punched up with fiery Jaffna curry powder. Into the mix she throws curry leaves, savoy cabbage and big pieces of her addictive roti, which get happily soaked; hot garlic butter finishes off the dish to make it a multitextured, high-spiced masterpiece.

Cured Dairy Beef, MountainChef Tomos Parry is a dairy cow evangelist, promoting the benefit of mature, strong-flavored beef that’s been retired from the milking world. The menu at his terrific Spanish-meets-Wales restaurant, Mountain, generally has a few imposing cuts cooking over fire at the back of the dining room. He also serves a plate of cured, fat-streaked, red-pink slices as a starter. They have the funky, almost cheesy flavor of top-of-the-line cured Italian meat. “For me it’s the perfect blend between bresaola and prosciutto,” Parry says, and I agree. The meat is served thinly sliced and at room temperature, so the fat melts on your tongue immediately.

Chips Bravas, TollingtonsThis groovy tapas spot in North London still feels like the fish-and-chips shop it used to be. That extends to chef Ed McIlroy’s chips bravas. His breathtakingly good version of the classic Spanish dish features properly chunky potatoes fried in beef fat, so they’re almost meaty. They’re generously drizzled with a punchy aioli redolent of garlic and a spiced tomato sauce that McIllroy reduces until the bottom is charred to blanket the dish with a compelling smoky kick.

Croque Ibai, IbaiAt this new industrial-style City steakhouse, the Basque menu highlights ginormous T-bones and ribs from elite Spanish cows. But my favorite is Richard Foster’s ridiculous Iberian rendition of a grilled cheese. It comprises airy Catalan bread, pan de cristal, layered with tomme de brebis cheese, tiny sweet shrimp and a crisped slab of boudin noir, or blood sausage. The sandwich is pan-fried with a weight on top to further mingle the unlikely ingredients, then served with a flourish of honey and espelette peppers. It’s a glorious surf-and-turf snack that’s crispy and melty cheesy with a hit of the sea from the shrimp.

Shallot Tatin, CamilleA French dining room that thinks it’s a natural wine bar, Camille is key to Borough Market’s compelling restaurant scene. The menu changes every time I’m there, but almost always there’s a genius savory take on the traditional French apple dessert. Elliot Hashtroudi embeds caramelized shallots in rounds of puff pastry, sprinkles the sides with some fennel seeds and a dusting of sugar, and bakes it off so the savory pastry is golden and flaky tender, with stunning bites of licorice from the toasted spice. Alongside there’s a rotating salad; if you’re lucky you’ll get the pungent, mustardy endive leaves that contrast nicely with the tart.

Portokalopita, MorchellaAt the Greek-minded Morchella, in a soaring former bank in Clerkenwell, Ben Marks takes a resourceful approach to the phyllo trimmings from their terrific spanakopita (whose creamy green filling also made it a best dish of the year contender). The phyllo is dried in the oven so it’s extra absorbent, then mixed with custard, orange juice and, unexpectedly, briny black olives before it’s baked. These olives add an uncanny punch to the jammy cake, which has been doused with rich citrus syrup and topped with whipped yogurt. A reminder to get resourceful with your food scraps!

New York City

Shrimp Cocktail, PennyBehind the long counter of this East Village upstairs restaurant, chef Joshua Pinsky rethinks the possibilities of a seafood joint. The concise menu has a few staples including photogenic grilled lobster that’s basted with herbs dipped in butter. But pay attention to the boring-sounding shrimp cocktail. Classically, the shrimp are briefly cooked in a flavored broth, then banished to cold water to chill. Pinsky turns the process upside down: He steams cured shrimp, then lets them hang out in a brine spiked with fish sauce and the fermented rice flavor enhancer shio koji, so the plump seafood has longer to absorb the brine’s pungent, salty sweetness.

Sichuan Filet Mignon, Mission Chinese Food Filet mignon is never my cut of choice. If I order a steak, I want it to be a meatier, chewier cut. But I was sold on the version Danny Bowien is serving at the return of his cult favorite Mission Chinese Food, now a pop-up in Chinatown. First he coats the meat in XO flour and pan-fries it, so it’s lightly crusted, like the chicken-fried steak he grew up with in Oklahoma City. Then he adds generous helpings of green Sichuan peppers and salted chiles to the pan sauce. The result: Every bite of the ultra-tender steak has the potent bite of saline chiles and vibrant pepper ricocheting around in your mouth.

Swordfish au Poivre, The OtterAlex Stupak is world famous for his precise Mexican cooking, but he also knows how to rethink a definitive American entree. At his new, seafood-focused dining room in the Manner Hotel in Soho, Stupak decided to use a meaty, 2-inch-thick cut of swordfish instead of steak. It’s pan-seared so it gets a delicious crust, but it stays juicy and tender within. And then there’s the mahogany-colored cream sauce, made extra savory with soy sauce, mustard and beef jus and sweeter with cognac, plus both Tellicherry and Madagascar green peppercorns for a double-fruity heat punch. The accompanying fries, ready to dip in that magic sauce, also benefit from a generous sprinkling of pepper.

Kyoto, Japan

Steamed King Crab, Noma KyotoWhen René Redzepi announced a 10-week residency for his famed Danish restaurant, Noma, in Kyoto in autumn, he promised that there would be crab. It kicks off the €840 ($881) 15-course meal—though you have to dig into a box of colorful fall leaves to find it. (The chef says his Copenhagen team dried 10,000 of them when they arrived in town.) The giant Hokkaido king crab leg has been grilled and poached, but first it’s cured in a mix that features koji (the innoculated grain used in sake brewing), which tenderizes the meat while accentuating the sweetness. In a little bowl alongside is the house “fudge,” a staple on Noma menus for years: a dark brown mix of miso, butter and dried rose petals that has a potent, darkly sweet and floral umami flavor. To keep up the adventure motif, there’s no silverware; instead you eat the crab with your hands after you’ve used a little flower brush to embellish it with the fudge.

Wintermelon, KokeWith only 48 hours to eat in Kyoto and one of the meals being the Noma residency (see above), going for a Spanish-Japanese tasting menu felt like a gamble. Now I will never stop talking about it. Chef Yusaku Nakamura’s outstanding 24,000 yen ($157) 15-course menu runs the gamut from pig-shaped, chorizo-filled crackers for tapas to arroz caldoso made with black sea snake. About halfway through the meal, the wintermelon course shows up: The fruit has been smoked and caramelized in a fireplace to dress up its mild flavor. Alongside is a bowl of fermented cream with the pickled winterfruit skin and a green leaf salad, served with a buttermilk sake dressing that makes a dramatically entrance atop smoking branches. Taste everything together, and the result is a sensory overload: fruit pushed to maximum sweetness, accented by tangy cream and pickles with the flavor of fire behind them.

Copenhagen

Space Bread, AlchemistIt will take $495,000 to eat aboard Spaceship Neptune next year, when Danish chef Rasmus Munk cooks for six diners up in the stratosphere. I won’t be one of them. But on a visit to his fantastical Alchemist restaurant, I got to taste a dish he plans to serve: space bread. Shaped more like a speckled black granite sake cup than a slice from a loaf, it’s so shockingly light it feels as if it could float—except for the overflowing filling of beluga caviar. Made from premium aged soy sauce that’s been aerated, then vacuum-packed, the “bread” has a rich caramelized flavor and practically evaporates in your mouth, leaving only the caviar to slowly burst with layers of saltiness. Munk developed the technique to feed patients at a children’s hospital who couldn’t eat solids but missed the crunch.

Paris

Rice Pudding Viennoiserie, Frappe Boulangerie Urbaine

TikTok can tell you a million places to go get a pastry fix in Paris. Here’s where I head to: Frappe, a light-filled space on a corner of the 11th arrondissement. Solenn le Squer—who was an early adaptor of the viral Suprême stuffed croissants—has a seasonally changing viennoiserie, aka yeasted dough pastry. Earlier this year, she filled it with rice pudding. And when I say filled, I mean it literally—her incredibly flaky pastry has an especially creamy, cinnamon-spiced version of the pudding in the center, lying in wait for the minute you cut into the crust so it spills out. I took pieces of pastry and scooped it up, like a delectable sweet dip.

Edinburgh

Bare Bones Chocolate-Pear Tart, Montrose The team that brought you the excellent Timberyard restaurant—see my 2023 best dishes of the year—is behind this year-old establishment that, appropriately for Edinburgh, is set in a building that looks like a mini castle. The finale of the five-course £80 ($101) menu from chefs Jimmy Murray and Moray Lamb is a dessert that, like the rest of the menu, spotlights local products. The star of the show is a mousse made with notably bittersweet chocolate from Bare Bones in Glasgow. It’s set on top of crunchy hazelnut meringue and then topped with a poached pear half and a dollop of zabaglione that’s been spiked with Marsala and cognac. All together, it’s a little tower of booze-spiked and dark chocolate creaminess with the soft bite of fruit to keep it going too far over the top.

New Orleans

Muffuletta Breadstick, Ayu BakehouseKelly Jacques, a veteran of the famed Breads Bakery in New York, has created what is the perfect Big Easy snack. Her long breadsticks channel the flavors of an iconic muffuletta: Chunks of mortadella and salami, plump olives and provolone, which melts out the sides, are arrayed throughout. The chewy doughy, golden breadstick, which can be served warm at her sunny corner bakery and also comes in a vegetarian option, is just sturdy enough to hold as a hand-held snack; Jacques says the location on Frenchmen Street, an area known for its fun bars and music venues, was a compelling reason to give revelers something to eat while they party.

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