Esquire has released its picks for "The Best New Restaurants in America, 2024," and one San Antonio concept is hanging onto the list in its own category. The magazine awards Pastry Chefs of the Year to Tavel Bristol-Joseph and Karla Espinosa for Nicosi, a 20-seat restaurant that serves a dessert-focused, eight-course tasting menu.
Published Tuesday, December 3, 35 restaurants make the cut. As is typical for endeavors like these, the five boroughs of New York City lead the way with eight restaurants, followed by Los Angeles with five. Four Kings, a Cantonese restaurant in San Francisco, earns Restaurant of the Year. The diversity of the included restaurants has puts Esquire food and drinks editor Jeff Gordinier in a contemplative mood.
“There never really has been any fixed, singular definition of American food, because the country and its cuisines — influenced by wave after wave of new arrivals — have remained in a state of perpetual transformation,” Gordinier writes in his introduction. “The ultimate answer to Jasper’s question is that American food, like American music, is something that’s always in motion.”
Despite the list's coastal focus, Texas isn’t completely ignored. The list names Late August, a Houston restaurant that explores the intersection of African American and Mexican culinary traditions, and Mābo, a Japanese restaurant in Dallas.
Unless they're very thorough readers, San Antonians wouldn't notice their local triumph, since it comes at the end of a pop-out gallery in the middle of the story. It's titled "The 5 People Redefining American Restaurants," and it doesn't appear to have any captions until the user clicks to enter.
The suddenly available caption for Nicosi reads: "An eight-course dessert tasting menu — just dessert — could be an ordeal. Self-serious. Weird. Saccharine. But at Nicosi in San Antonio, Bristol-Joseph and Espinosaare too damn talented to make it anything but a blast."
It also acknowledges that Espinosa has recently left Nicosi.
While they were working together, Bristol-Joseph and Espinoza brought pastry chefs’ perspective to tasting menus at Nicosi, which also earned a Recommended designation from Michelin. The restaurant famously doesn’t allow photos and doesn’t give diners a menu, allowing them to experience the dishes without any preconceived notions.
“We live in a society where people take photos, and they totally miss what the chef is describing,” Bristol-Joseph said on a recent episode of CultureMap’s What’s Eric Eating podcast. “I was looking at that trend and saying, ‘how do I create a space that forces everyone to be present?’ We’re not going to have a menu in front of you. I’m going to speak, and you’re going to listen or else you’re not going to know what you’re having.”
At Houston's Late August, which opened in March in Midtown’s Ion mixed-use development, contributor Joshua David Stein praises Williams and executive chef Sergio Hidalgo for “bravura acts of culinary invention” such as citrus pork confit with mustard-and-collard-greens masa and field pea hummus topped with fried grasshoppers.
Late August has already received some national attention. It is Houston’s only Black-owned restaurant to earn a spot in the Michelin Guide, where it received a Recommended designation.
Skipping over to Dallas, Omar Mamoon hails Mābo as the best place in America to eat chicken yakitori, a Japanese grilling technique. “At Mābo, his eight-seat counter, chef Masayuki Otaka prepares a two-hour meal in which poultry is the star. He sources free-ranging heritage breeds from Pennsylvania, and he lets you order additional skewers — maybe you’re in the mood for more tail, or for the fatty triangular nub known as the pope’s nose — when the planned courses have reached their completion,” he writes.
In 2023, Esquire named Este, a Mexican seafood restaurant in Austin, as Texas’ only representative on the Best New Restaurants list. It simultaneously named Houston’s Nonno’s Family Pizza Tavern as its Pizza Joint of the Year.
