The 9 Most Anticipated Restaurant Openings of 2024

And just like that, it’s 2024. February will have 29 days, there’s a presidential election on the horizon, and the restaurant world is buzzing with openings. There’s a lot to keep track of, but we’re already doing the work of researching—and cross-country dining—in preparation for our yearly Best New Restaurants list.

This year, the chef behind one of the Best New Restaurants of 2022 is opening a spot for Mexican mariscos in New Orleans, and the team behind a Vietnamese mainstay in Portland, Maine, is opening a second restaurant all about Khmer Chinese cooking. While some restaurant veterans are expanding their footholds, Detroit and San Francisco will see the openings of two restaurants from promising first-time restaurateurs.

From modern Filipino cooking in Denver to a long-awaited fish fry restaurant from one of Asheville, North Carolina’s favorite chefs, these are the nine restaurant openings we’re most excited for in 2024.

This list is organized alphabetically by city. The opening dates below are subject to change, so check restaurant websites and Instagram accounts for the latest updates.

A fish fry from a Top Chef in Asheville

Good Hot Fish
Asheville, NC
Opening: Early 2024

We’ve been awaiting the permanent location of Ashleigh Shanti’s Good Hot Fish since she announced the seafood restaurant two years ago. Shanti has been busy in the meantime—appearing on Top Chef, helping to launch culinary operations at the new Hotel Genevieve in Louisville, Kentucky, and hosting pop-up events all over North Carolina and the East Coast. Good Hot Fish will be a fish camp–style restaurant spotlighting the approach to cooking—merging Black Appalachian and Southern traditions—that Shanti became known for during her tenure at celebrated Southern restaurant Benne on Eagle. The restaurant will open early this year in Asheville’s South Slope neighborhood in partnership with Burial Beer Co.’s newest taproom, Eulogy. Diners can expect pop-up favorites like smoked catfish gumbo, sticky-sweet fish-sauce-glazed wings, and a cornmeal-battered catfish sandwich with sour collard greens.

Wood-fired fare from a decorated Atlanta chef

Nàdair
Atlanta, GA
Opening: Spring

Kevin Gillespie’s announcement of his new restaurant Nàdair was met with a lot of excitement from Atlantans and Top Chef fans across the US alike. Gillespie is the owner of the celebrated New American restaurant Gunshow and a James Beard Award finalist for both Outstanding Restaurateur and Best Chef: Southeast. He wants Nàdair to be the “next chapter” of the fire-kissed, farm-to-table cooking he became known for at Woodfire Grill, which closed in 2015. Nàdair, whose name comes from the Scottish Gaelic phrase dòigh nàdair (meaning “the way of nature”), will take over the former space of Floataway Cafe in the Woodland Hills. The menu will feature hearty Scottish-inspired fare, with an emphasis on local ingredients: Scotch pie with lamb, cranberry, and candied orange, slow-roasted leg of deer with corn pudding and black treacle sauce, and North Georgia rainbow trout with mustard greens are just some of the dishes we’re looking forward to.

Creative Filipino cooking arrives in Denver

Magna Kainan
Denver, CO
Opening: Late Spring

Carlo Lamagna, the chef behind beloved Portland, Oregon, area restaurants Magna Kusina and Magna Kubo, is bringing his Filipino cooking to the Mile High City with the opening of Magna Kainan. Lamagna, who will debut the restaurant in late spring in Denver’s RiNo district, will be cooking many of the signatures that have earned him a whole lot of praise. Among the dishes to look forward to are crab-fat noodles, oxtail kare-kare, and crispy lumpia. To open Magna Kainan, he is partnering with the Culinary Creative Group, which owns local restaurants like Mister Oso and Ash’Kara. With his newest project, the Philippines native will combine the concepts of his two restaurants—Magna Kusina, which focuses on modern takes on classical Filipino cooking, and Magna Kubo, which serves rotisserie-style meats in a lechóneria format.

A Liberian pop-up scores a permanent space in Detroit

Little Liberia
Detroit, MI
Opening: Summer

Devoted fans of the Detroit West African pop-up Little Liberia will soon be able to enjoy chef Ameneh Marhaba’s cooking at a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Marhaba quickly built a following in the community when she started sharing her Liberian and Lebanese dishes in 2016 at festivals and venues like Brewery Faisan. In 2022, Marhaba won the Hatch Detroit contest, which provided funding for the opening of Little Liberia. She suspects this will be the first Liberian restaurant in the city. Little Liberia sits on the same block of Woodward Avenue where an increasing number of African restaurants like Baobab Fare and Yum Village have opened in recent years. Marhaba tells Eater she’s “excited to create a space where our guests and fellow immigrants can experience the essence of West Africa.” She’ll serve traditional dishes like seafood palm butter, potato greens, and chuck rice and gravy.

A casual seafood restaurant from a star New Orleans chef

Acamaya
New Orleans, LA
Opening: Spring

Acamaya is the first solo venture of chef Ana Sofia Castro, the culinary wiz behind the modern Mexican tasting menu spot Lengua Madre in New Orleans, which has received just about every accolade out there, including a spot on Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list in 2022. Lengua Madre recently closed and Castro is branching out to debut Acamaya, a more casual Mexican mariscos restaurant that she will run with her sister, Lydia, in New Orleans’s Bywater neighborhood. The menu will feature dishes that lean into the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico: grilled octopus in walnut salsa negra, cold-smoked al pastor cobia tostadas, and green rice with clams. The lively, laid-back spirit of Acamaya celebrates Castro’s adopted hometown of New Orleans and her native Mexico in equal parts.

A new project from the duo behind a New York hot spot

Penny
New York, NY
Opening: Spring

If you’ve scrolled Instagram much in the past year, chances are you lingered over a photo of the Matilda-like chocolate cake at Claud, a wildly popular East Village wine bar with some of the hardest tables in town to nab. Now Chase Sinzer and Joshua Pinsky, who met while working for Momofuku in 2014, are opening a raw bar in the space directly above their hit restaurant. Penny will serve crudo, oysters, and cooked shellfish. Like at Claud, Sinzer is curating the wine list to feature both classic and contemporary bottles, with a spotlight on Champagne and white wine to pair with the nautical menu. Ian Chapin of Edsel Co is designing the space, which will have all counter seating so guests have a front-row seat to the shucking action at the raw bar. Only time will tell what Penny’s breakout Instagram star dish might be.

A Khmer-Chinese restaurant from Portland restaurant veterans

Oun Lidos
Portland, ME
Opening: Spring

The opening of Oun Lidos, the second restaurant from the team behind popular Portland Vietnamese mainstay Cong Tu Bot, is a good enough reason to book a trip to Maine this spring. Oun Lidos will be a multilevel restaurant in Old Port, with an all-day take-out counter offering Chinatown-style baked goods, rice plates, and boba to go. Chef Bounahcree Kim will move over from Cong Tu Bot to helm the kitchen and serve the Khmer Chinese food of his childhood, with dishes like iced jello salad with coconut sauce and mi ka thung—a fresh wide noodle stir-fry with shredded beef, five-spice gravy, and pickled mustard greens. While Oun Lidos completes construction, Kim is testing out additional menu items like a bahn chao waffle and a bao breakfast sandwich during a “breakfast residency” at Cong Tu Bot. The Oun Lidos team of Kim plus Cong Tu Bot owners Jessica Sheahan and Vien Doubui will open the take-out counter in February with plans to debut full service later this spring.

A San Francisco restaurant rooted in Cantonese nostalgia

Four Kings
San Francisco, CA
Opening: Early 2024

Four Kings, whose name is a nod to the ’90s Hong Kong pop stars the Four Heavenly Kings, will make its debut in San Francisco’s Chinatown early this year. The project comes from chefs Franky Ho and Mike Long, who met while cooking at the Michelin-starred and locally beloved Chinese American spot Mister Jiu’s. They introduced the Bay Area to the “Canto nostalgia” fare of Four Kings in early 2023, with sold-out pop-up events at wine bar Buddy and other restaurants around the city, which they ran with their partners Millie Boonkokua and Lucy Li. According to the team, Four Kings is intended to function as an izakaya-like restaurant—an informal space designed for sharing drinks and no-fuss bites—for Cantonese food, with dishes like fried squab, pork chop rice, escargot with XO butter, and mapo spaghetti. So that everyone can join in on the party, there will be an open kitchen with lots of bar seating and hip-hop blasting from the speakers.

Bodega-style street food in Seattle

Bad Chancla
Seattle, WA
Opening: Early Spring

The Capitol Hill take-out and pick-up spot Bad Chancla comes from Seattle chef José Garzón, whose other concepts include Lola’s Supper Club and Chifa Baby!, both of which focus on Latin American street food. Bad Chancla promises—in a tagline proudly printed on the space’s front window— that it’s “not your abuela’s cooking.” Garzón says that Bad Chancla is a “love letter to millennial immigrants and first-gen Latinx Americans.” What does that look like? A menu featuring bodega-style sandwiches like the Dominican “Riki Tiki” (with picadillo beef, potatoes, tomatoes, macerated cabbage, mayo, and hard-boiled eggs), Puerto Rican tripletas (a three-meat sandwich similar to a Cubano), rice bowls like the Chepo bowl (with rice, guisada beans, salsa criolla, and house sauces), and late-night grilled cheese.