Best of New York 2014 • Eating

• Narcissa

  21 Cooper Sq., nr. 5th St.; 212-228-3344

  Carrots are the current must-have menu veggie, but John Fraser still manages to make them feel novel. At Narcissa—Fraser’s new restaurant in the Standard East Village hotel—the kitchen starts with thumb-size carrots from Standard owner André Balazs’s upstate farm, curing and blanching them before battering and frying to order. The exterior is impeccably crisp, the just-cooked carrots inside tender and sweet. For dipping: lime-and-jalapeño-spiked silken tofu whipped to the consistency of mayonnaise. Order them as a snack, a side dish, whatever. “Our goal,” Fraser says, “is to have one on every table.”

From the 2014 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine