The 10 Most Anticipated Restaurant Openings of 2026

Three Michelin stars from California, distilled into Kyoto. Nothing about this reservation will be easy.

Kyle and Katina Connaughton built SingleThread Farms in Healdsburg, California, into one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world — three Michelin stars, a wine program of near-religious devotion, and a farm that supplies the kitchen. Kyle trained under Heston Blumenthal in the UK and spent years working in Japanese kitchens before returning to California. SoNoMa is the project that closes the circle.

The Kyoto outpost, housed inside the Capella hotel, takes its name from Northern California (So-No-Ma — Sonoma) while drawing directly on the Japanese sensibility that shaped the founders' cooking philosophy. Expect a kaiseki-influenced tasting format that maps seasonal produce across both California and Japan, delivered with the pacing and precision that made their Healdsburg flagship untouchable.

For anyone looking to impress a client who travels well or to mark an occasion that demands a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime table, SoNoMa is the opening of the year. Having a reservation here before the reviews land is a statement. Getting one after will require extraordinary patience — or connections.

Sixteen seats, eighteen courses of heirloom corn. New York has not seen ambition this focused in years.

Johnny and Kasie Curiel built their reputation at Alma Fonda Fina, a Michelin-starred celebration of Mexican cuisine in Denver. Maize is their New York statement — a 16-seat tasting menu restaurant dedicated entirely to masa, heirloom corn, regional moles, and the ancestral techniques that underpin Mexican gastronomy at its most rigorous. The room will be intimate by design: no tablecloths, direct sightlines to the kitchen, every seat in the chef's confidence.

The 18-course format moves through tamales made with Oaxacan black corn, duck confit tostadas, and a mole negro that reportedly requires four days of preparation. The beverage program draws heavily on mezcal and Mexican wine — a category the Curiels believe is critically underserved by the New York market.

For a first date, this is haute theatre in the best sense: a shared journey through a cuisine that most Americans do not know in this form. For impressing clients, the pedigree and scarcity alone do the work. Book via Tock the moment reservations open — inventory at 16 seats disappears in minutes.

Colombia's finest culinary mind leaves Cartagena and arrives in Medellín with something to prove.

Jaime Rodríguez is the chef behind Celele in Cartagena — ranked No.5 on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants 2025 — and Boro is his most personal project to date. Set in Medellín, a city whose food scene has transformed dramatically over the past decade, Boro's founding ethos is "shared roots, new flavours": an exploration of Colombia's biodiversity through contemporary technique and a menu that refuses to flatten the country's regional complexity into a single narrative.

Expect dishes that draw from Colombia's Pacific coast fishing traditions, highland cattle culture, and Afro-Colombian culinary heritage. Rodríguez has spoken publicly about building relationships with Indigenous suppliers across three distinct ecosystems — his kitchen will be a direct conduit between those communities and the international dining audience that follows Latin America's best closely.

Medellín is now a destination city for serious diners exploring South America beyond Buenos Aires and Lima. Boro will accelerate that. For birthdays or occasions that demand a dinner worth the flight, this is the table on the continent to watch in 2026.

The team that built Chicago's most reliable power-dining rooms does it again — with a chef straight from The Bear's world.

James Beard Award-winning restaurateurs Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz have constructed some of Chicago's most successful dining rooms — Boka, Girl & the Goat, Swift & Sons — and their new 150-seat venture Gingie arrives with an outsized reputation to match. Chef Brian Lockwood, who built his profile consulting on The Bear's culinary direction, brings his first brick-and-mortar debut to a project that has Chicago's hospitality industry watching closely.

The concept is ambitious in scale: 150 seats is not a tasting menu salon, it is a dining room that expects volume without sacrificing quality. Lockwood's food sits in the contemporary American lane — technically rigorous, ingredient-led, seasonally driven — with a wood-fire element that Chicago kitchens have embraced as both tool and statement. Expect dry-aged beef preparations, whole-animal cookery, and vegetable dishes that make the meat optional.

For closing deals and team dinners, the combination of Boehm-Katz hospitality infrastructure and Lockwood's cooking ambition produces exactly the right environment: enough theatre to signal importance, enough ease to let conversation run. Chicago's dining scene has rarely had two more reliable guarantors of a great room.

Greg Vernick's first opening in six years. This is what a chef does when he stops holding back.

Greg Vernick is among the most respected chef-restaurateurs in the United States — his eponymous Vernick Food & Drink earned him a James Beard Award and made Philadelphia relevant on the national dining map. Emilia is his first new restaurant in over six years, and the direction is a deliberate pivot: a neighbourhood trattoria format where pasta is the engine, but seasonal vegetables, antipasti, and wood-fired entrées share the stage in equal measure.

The reference point is Emilia-Romagna — the Italian region that gave the world tortellini, tagliatelle, and the tradition of treating pasta as philosophy rather than side dish. Vernick's version will move through hand-rolled pastas stuffed with ricotta and black truffle, tagliolini with brown butter and Parmigiano aged 36 months, and braised short rib served in a reduction that takes three days to build.

For a first date, Emilia hits the exact register that works: impressive enough to signal effort, convivial enough to let a conversation develop across multiple courses. No dress code anxiety, no tasting menu pressure, no silence between courses. Pasta is the most naturally social food format in fine dining, and Vernick knows it.

Andrew Black opens his most personal restaurant yet — Miami's Caribbean inheritance finally given its proper fine dining moment.

James Beard Award-winning chef Andrew Black opened Dougla — named for the mixed African and East Indian heritage of Trinidad and Tobago — on Valentine's Day 2026, drawing on West Indian, Indo-Caribbean, and African culinary traditions. The room is warm and deliberately celebratory: rich textiles, a bar program that centres rums from across the Caribbean basin, and a layout built for the kind of long dinner that belongs to birthdays and meaningful milestones.

The menu moves through saltfish accras with scotch bonnet aioli, oxtail pelau with pigeon peas and coconut, and a dessert program anchored by tamarind curd tart and rum-soaked black cake. Black sources spices directly from small farmers in Grenada and Trinidad, and the spice cabinet alone is unlike anything else operating in Miami at this level.

Miami's dining scene has long underserved the Caribbean culinary tradition that is arguably the city's most natural cultural inheritance. Dougla corrects that. For a birthday dinner, the flavour intensity, the celebratory energy of the room, and the cocktail list make it the most joyful opening in Miami since Cote landed in 2019.

Korean-Californian beef culture collides with a serious wine list. San Francisco finally has a steakhouse worth talking about.

Junsoo and Hyunyoung Bae — a husband-and-wife chef team — are opening Monami as a "modern Korean steak house," a concept that maps Korean cattle preparation and table culture onto Northern California's extraordinary produce landscape and wine heritage. Their shared background straddles Korean and American culinary traditions, and Monami represents the clearest distillation of that synthesis to date.

The menu foregrounds Korean cuts and preparations — galbi, chadolbaegi, and thin-sliced short rib alongside wet-aged prime — with banchan built from Bay Area farms and a wine program that champions California producers the Baes have worked with personally over the years. The format is sharing-friendly, designed for long tables but equally suited to a two-top.

San Francisco's fine dining scene is in the middle of a genuine renaissance post-pandemic, and Monami arrives with the timing and concept to become the city's defining new-school steakhouse. For San Francisco deal dinners, it carries the authority of Korean culinary rigour combined with the cultural fluency that Bay Area diners respond to.

Hollywood Reporter named it most anticipated in the world. Boston diners are about to find out why.

Rosa y Marigold landed on The Hollywood Reporter's global list of most anticipated hotel and restaurant openings of 2026 — rare recognition for a Back Bay restaurant that has not yet served its first cover. The hotel-dining format, the Latin culinary reference points, and the Back Bay location suggest a room that bridges old Boston money with contemporary dining ambition in a way the city has historically struggled to achieve.

The concept draws on Latin floral and botanical traditions for both the menu and the aesthetic — hence the name, pairing the Spanish word for rose with the marigold's significance in Day of the Dead culture. Expect a menu structured around ceviche, wood-grilled proteins, and botanically-driven cocktails with a visual identity that makes the room one of the most photographable in New England.

For proposals specifically, the combination of romantic aesthetic, considered service, and the genuine excitement of being among the first diners creates an atmosphere that a long-established restaurant cannot replicate. Book within the first month of opening and that scarcity itself becomes part of the story you tell. Browse proposal restaurants worldwide for further inspiration.

Danny Meyer's first step outside New York in years. Boston has been waiting for this without knowing it.

Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group — the force behind Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, and Union Square Cafe — is making its first significant US expansion in years, planting flags in both Boston and Detroit simultaneously in 2026. For Boston, the arrival signals something significant: USHG hospitality standards, applied to a city that has produced exceptional chefs but rarely the seamless service culture that USHG has made its calling card.

USHG openings are defined by a particular texture of hospitality — generous, informed, never servile — backed by food that is excellent without demanding the diner's full intellectual attention. The Boston venue will draw on New England produce and seafood traditions while adding the polish that comes from 40 years of building the world's most studied dining organisation.

For deal dinners and team outings, USHG is the gold standard precisely because the service infrastructure removes friction. The table management, the wine guidance, the pacing — everything works, every time. That reliability is worth more than novelty when business is on the line.

Danny Meyer goes to Detroit. The city's most significant dining investment in a generation.

Detroit has been building its food scene quietly and seriously for a decade. The arrival of Union Square Hospitality Group in 2026 is the moment that story reaches a national audience. USHG's commitment to a city outside the established fine dining coastal belt is itself a statement — it suggests a group that has studied where American dining culture is genuinely growing, rather than where it has already peaked.

The Detroit project will draw on the city's rich culinary heritage — its deep Southern and African American food traditions, the Eastern European immigrant cooking that shaped its working-class neighbourhoods, and the extraordinary Midwestern produce landscape that chefs in the region are only now learning to fully exploit. USHG's ability to synthesise heritage with contemporary technique makes them the right team to do it justice.

For anyone travelling to Detroit for business or marking an occasion in a city that is genuinely having its moment, this will be the mandatory table from the day it opens. It is a restaurant that makes Detroit matter in a conversation it has deserved to be part of for years. See our full browse all cities guide for more emerging dining destinations.