One Of The Best Desserts In The U.S. Is Hidden Inside This Serene Michelin-Starred Japanese Hideaway In Chinatown

If you’re the kind of diner who *always* saves room for dessert, you probably know your way around NYC’s sweetest spots. And as 2025 winds down, there’s no better excuse to indulge in a little end of year treat yourself energy. The New York Times clearly feels the same–alongside their list of the best new NYC restaurants of 2025, they’ve also rounded up the 14 best restaurant desserts they ate across the entire U.S. this year. Their Food staff puts it best: > The New York Times Food staff is made up of dessert people. No restaurant meal is complete without a request for a few spoons, or a sly ‘I’ll just have one bite.’ As we ventured across the country for months of scouting trips to find the best restaurants of the year, we didn’t neglect sweet treats. Here are our favorite desserts of 2025. And lucky for New Yorkers, one of those top desserts is tucked away inside a buzzed-about kaiseki counter in Chinatown –so consider this your cue to save room for dessert! NYT Best Restaurant Desserts Across the U.S. -------------------------------------------- On April 2, 2025, Chef Isao Yamada opened the doors to his renowned kaiseki restaurant, Yamada, in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown. And despite the cutthroat nature of the city’s dining scene, it didn’t take long for Yamada to gain acclaim for its high-level Japanese cuisine and serene, minimalist ambiance–even earning a Michelin Star this past November. You may remember Chef Yamada from his days at Brushstroke (a highly-regarded Japanese restaurant in Tribeca) alongside David Bouley, where he introduced many New Yorkers to the art of kaiseki (懐石) or kaiseki-ryōri (懐石料理), a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner. At his namesake restaurant, Chef Yamada offers a 10-course kaiseki tasting menu that artfully progresses through distinct cooking methods typical of kaiseki cuisine–think: frying, grilling, steaming, and simmering–while harmoniously balancing the colors, textures, and flavors of the season. Each menu ends with a customary tea ceremony, a nod to the origins of kaiseki in 16th century Japan. But before you even make it to the tea portion of the meal, you arrive at arguably the best part: dessert –a taste NYT food editors hold in high regards. They write: > Made with a miniaturist’s eye for detail, this wagashi — a kind of Japanese sweet that traditionally accompanied the tea ceremony, to ease the bitterness of the tea — is molded from shiro-an (white bean paste) and adorned with wobbly agar jellies in colors coaxed from butterfly pea flower and dragon fruit, to evoke a hydrangea in blossom. Listen closely and you can hear the pop and rustle of carbonated sugar. It sounds like rain. And just as delicate as the dessert itself is where you’ll find it. Yamada is a serene Japanese hideaway tucked inside Chinatown’s Canal Arcade –a discreet passageway linking Elizabeth Street and Bowery, and home to some of NYC’s most serious Japanese fine-dining destinations. The minimalist interior makes you feel worlds away from the busy streets outside; the perfect quiet setting to enjoy a standout meal with no distractions. Know Before You Go ------------------ * 📍 16 Elizabeth Street * 💲 $295 per person * 🗓️ Tuesday – Saturday * ⏰ Two nightly seatings: 5:30 pm & 8:30 pm (each approximately two hours) * !?️ Learn more Source: https://secretnyc.co/best-restaurant-desserts-us-2025-new-york-times-yamada-nyc/