Semma tops New York Times’ 2025 best restaurants list

Semma’s rise to No. 1 gave New York diners a clear headline and an easier way to use the Times’ latest restaurant sweep: start with the top 10, then treat the remaining 90 as a searchable map instead of a ladder. The Greenwich Village restaurant, described as a South Indian spot that opened in 2021, became the first Indian restaurant ever to top the Times’s New York City best-restaurants list.

The list itself was rebuilt under interim critics Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark after Pete Wells stepped down as the paper’s restaurant critic in 2024. The pair tasted more than 20,000 contenders and added about 100 fresh prospects before narrowing the field to 100, a reminder of how dense the city’s dining scene has become in a place widely counted at roughly 20,000 to 23,000 restaurants. In 2025, only the top 10 were ranked, while the other 90 restaurants were presented alphabetically, a format that makes it easier to browse by neighborhood, cuisine and occasion rather than by a single score.

That shift matters for readers trying to eat well without treating the city like an all-or-nothing luxury circuit. Semma is the destination for a major celebratory meal in Greenwich Village, while Kabawa, Momofuku’s Caribbean tasting-menu restaurant, arrived high on the list for diners looking for a more elaborate night out. The tasting-menu format signals a longer meal and a bigger bill, but it also gives the list a clear special-occasion option for anyone planning ahead instead of improvising at the host stand.

The geography of the 2025 selection also widens the field beyond Manhattan’s marquee addresses. Brooklyn eateries made up more than one-fifth of the list in some coverage, and Upper West Side favorites remained visible, giving more neighborhoods a place in a city ranking that can otherwise feel dominated by a few well-known corridors. For diners who live outside Greenwich Village or who want a shorter trip, that spread is the practical value of the list: it offers high-end choices near where people already are, not only where critics and destination diners tend to go.

After Wells’s final ranking drew outsized attention in 2024, the 2025 edition kept the annual project in the spotlight under new editorial leadership. The message from this year’s list is less about chasing prestige than choosing the version of New York dining that fits the night, the neighborhood and the budget.