Smithereens

Cagen ran a sushi counter down these steps off East 9th Street until Nick Tamburo took the room and filled it with New England. The moment The Infatuation picks out is a fried fish collar he gives the Nashville hot chicken treatment. His partner Nikita Malhotra pours the wine, nearly all of it white, and won MICHELIN Guide New York's Sommelier of the Year in 2022 at her last job.

Why go

Tamburo grew up on the northern East Coast and buys most of the seafood from Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Montauk. He named the room for the 1982 Susan Seidelman film about the East Village punk scene, and his own reading of the word is that it means small broken pieces, which is what he says he is putting back together out of everything he learned at Momofuku Ko and on Claud's opening team. The room is dark and half underground, with a narrow pass you can perch at and watch somebody smear smoked bluefish onto a plate. Willa Moore's phrase for it is more sexy submarine than seaside cottage.1

Order this / avoid

Order: the anadama bread, at $9 as of November 2025, and pay it. Tamburo built it off historic New England recipes from the 1800s, with molasses, rye flour and roasted cornmeal, and the butter is cultured at PloughGate Creamery in Vermont and seasoned with dulse and nori. The name comes from a fisherman who tipped flour into the cornmeal porridge his wife kept making him and shouted Anna, damn her!3
Order first: the buckwheat pancake, thin and crisp at the edges, draped over a mound of smoked bluefish. It was $24 in December 2025.6
Order if it is on: the abalone skewers with shiitake and egg yolk against the rice with quahog clams. Bettina Makalintal reports the char on the skewers is what the rice wants, and the kitchen pairs them on purpose.6
Order for dessert: the apple cider doughnut, which is the reason to book this in the fall. Tamburo's complaint about the ones he grew up on: Whenever I eat an apple cider doughnut, I'm disappointed that it just tastes like cinnamon and sugar rather than apples or cider.3 So he works cider into the batter and finishes it with freeze-dried apple and malic acid.
Avoid: bringing someone whose idea of seafood is a dozen oysters. There is nothing raw on the half shell.

What locals & experts say

Willa Moore, The Infatuation, 3 November 2025, rated 9.2: It's like Smithereens took New England, bought it an Amtrak ticket and an all-black outfit, and sent it straight to the East Village. And New England just settled right in.1 She warns that the celery float, celery root ice cream in pale green soda, might not work for everyone as a dessert.
Nikita Malhotra, on why the list is white, MICHELIN Guide feature, 16 December 2024: Right now, we are focused on white wines, with high acidity being the central theme.3 She opened with around 65 bottles, mostly German, and says the printed selection is a daily snapshot of what is in the cellar.
Ligaya Mishan, reviewing it for The New York Times on 19 August 2025, a Critic's Pick at three stars: it is a love letter to the North Atlantic at its most ominous and brooding, written in seaweed and smashed lobster heads. Even the martini tastes like a gulp of saltwater, the last memory of a drowning man.4
Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at Eater, filing a dining report on 22 December 2025: Though many seafood spots are bright and airy like Nantucket summer, Smithereens is darker and more esoteric, like Salem winter.6
The Infatuation, on what a night costs: the average check for two comes to $260, and another $100 if you order a second bottle.2

Good to know

Beer: the Narragansett was $5 in November 2025, and Moore notes it is still just a Narragansett.
Standing: Ligaya Mishan kept it on the Times' 2026 hundred best, and The Infatuation ranks it eleventh in the city.5 8
The wine: Eater's line on the list is that there is always a page of rieslings to choose from.7
Menu: it changes with the seasons, and a couple of limited dishes are hand-written on it each day, which is where the off cuts and the by-catch from Montauk turn up.

Jeff's take (his words)

Note: "Best new winner." The list behind that is The Infatuation's NYC's Best New Restaurants of 2025, which carries fourteen rooms and does not rank them.

Verdict

must-visit — They publish no phone number, so the booking happens online and it wants doing early. If one dish is going to decide it for you, make it the whole barbecue mackerel.

Smithereens.