When I’m scouting for Bon Appétit’s annual Best New Restaurants list (coming soon!), I set my alarm about two hours earlier than I’d dream of waking up back home in New York. My “official” order of business is typically some buzzed-about dinner spot, but my greatest thrills these past few years have often come before noon. As American breakfast morphs and expands to encompass morning rituals the world over, our first meal of the day has become something we seek out and treat with deserved respect.
Though there’s a long and understandable tradition of chefs phoning in the breakfast shift and focusing their energy on dinner, this year was dominated by restaurants approaching the morning meal with excitement and creativity. Even as old-school diners close, taking their nostalgic railroad car facades and bitter-as-bark coffee with them, chefs are revitalizing the genre with an eye for thoughtful sourcing and reimagined breakfast plates. While the restaurants on this list aren’t above French toast and pancakes, they bring something new to even the most well-trodden dishes.
At Tanzie’s, a snug daytime restaurant in Berkeley, partners Krissana Tussanaprasit and Jezreel Rojas season billowy ribbons of soft scrambled eggs with chicken bouillon and serve them alongside hunks of braised beef shank and lashings of the fiery, galangal-heavy Thai condiment nam prik kha—call it Steak and Eggs 2.0. And in a sunny Austin alley outfitted with makeshift milk crate tables, earlybird Texans sip chamomile-maize soda and revel in Mercado Sin Nombre’s dusky masa pancakes. Soaked in syrup made with the unrefined sugar piloncillo, they’re anything but old-hat. In 2025, you deserve more than a bowl of oatmeal and a scrap of toast. These 14 new breakfast spots are sure to get you right. —Elazar Sontag, restaurant editor
Bayan Ko Diner, Chicago
Bangus and eggs and a ropa vieja breakfast burrito.Photo by Jeff Marini
At the tropically appointed, all-day spot Bayan Ko Diner on Chicago’s North Side, wife-husband owners Raquel Quadreny and chef Lawrence Letrero reimagine diner breakfast through the satiating, sticky-good melding of Filipino and Cuban culture. It helps that they’re already beloved for this brilliant mashup at their Michelin-recognized sibling restaurant, Bayan Ko, about 200 feet away. Expect Cubano breakfast burritos with shaggy ropa vieja; plates of custardy scrambled eggs, black beans, and sweet plantains; and sisig hash. In the hash, tender-crisp cubes of pork belly mingle with shishito peppers and smashed potatoes beneath a sunny egg squiggled with black vinegar aioli. “Garlic rice?” isn’t so much a question as an affirmation that you’ve chosen the correct side for sopping up all that yolk and meaty juice. You’ll want the brioche-like Filipino sweet bread ensaymada for the table, capped with melted cheddar and soused in cinnamon glaze. In typical diner fashion, the coffee will keep coming till you say “enough.” —Maggie Hennessy, contributing writer
Circles, Hudson, New York
Circles is, first and foremost, a bagel shop. Tray Tepper fine-tuned his recipe over years of pop-ups,
