The Best New Restaurants to Try in 2025

No, Dancerobot isn’t the name of a techno club or the latest AI advancement—it’s chef Jesse Ito’s new 80s-inflected Japanese izakaya coming to Rittenhouse Square. Ito has spent eight years wowing Philly diners at his highly acclaimed Royal Sushi and Izakaya in Queen Village, where there’s almost never an empty seat. His new spot, which he’ll open with Royal’s longtime executive chef Justin Bacharach, is more casual. The menu will spotlight Japanese comfort food classics like katsu curry, mentaiko pasta, and koji-marinated wagyu roast beef with shallot dashi gravy and miso mashed potatoes. On the weekends, diners can delight in breakfast sets known as teishoku, house milk bread toast, and bacon, egg, and cheese yaki onigiri. Judging from the neon pink logo and name, Dancerobot projects to be a high-energy, sake-filled party.

Honeysuckle

Philadelphia, PA
Opening: Spring

Honeysuckle, the culinary enterprise from Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, has lived many lives—from pop-up dinners to pandemic takeout to Honeysuckle Provisions, their Afrocentric market-café that opened in September 2022. The Tates recently closed the West Philly storefront, which offered ingredients often sourced locally from Black farmers and daytime takeout items like black-eyed pea scrapple and “Hot Cheetos”-dusted chicken biscuits. An Instagram post teases that they’ll open a full-fledged restaurant in a larger space in the city’s North Broad area with “more seating, more dining options, and even cocktails.”

JouJou

San Francisco, CA
Opening: Spring

JouJou is the next big effort from David Barzelay and Colleen Booth, the duo behind the two-Michelin-starred San Francisco favorite Lazy Bear. The grand, old-school French restaurant will take over a 6,000-square-foot space with a glass-enclosed patio, raw bar, and sunken garden. The menu skews French with an emphasis on seafood. There are oysters and frites, salmon almondine with dill beure blanc, shrimp bisque, and bananas foster. Plus, with a name like JouJou, which means “toy” or “plaything,” Barzelay is promising theatrics like a sand dab dramatically fileted tableside.

Elmina

Washington, DC
Opening: Winter

Eric Adjepong has done it all. He has shared his Ghanaian-American cooking on Top Chef and several Food Network shows, has a cookbook publishing in March, and even penned a children’s book. But Elmina, which opens later this month in DC, is his first restaurant. Elmina celebrates contemporary Ghanaian cuisine from Adjepong’s first-generation upbringing in a setting meant to feel like the capital city of Accra, replete with green-blue tones and accents of gold evoking its coastal locale. The upscale spot will offer both an à la carte and tasting (five courses for $105) with classics like kelewele and fufu, plus new interpretations like a jollof duck pot with three types of duck (confit leg, breast, and egg) and stewed black eyed peas with crispy sweet plantains.