If you find, you can dine.
Because sometimes, it's about the journey.

Up a stairwell, down an alley, through a secret door. Clandestine locations that make you feel like an insider. Many of these places aren't so secret anymore, but they remain the discoveries we like to have in our arsenal so we can bring our unknowing friends.

KUMA INN

Chef King Phojanakong is very familiar with off the beaten track. His Asian tapas restaurant is on the second floor of a former tenement building on Ludlow Street. A peeling-paint entrance may not be the most grand, but it definitely adds to the appeal.

BANH MI SAIGON BAKERY

When Chef King Phojanakong craves Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches, he heads to the back of a jewelry store to find the real gem. Cases of bangles and earrings in the front, woman packing pork and cilantro into baguettes in the back.

BOHEMIAN

This chic and sleek Japanese izakaya is located behind an East Village butcher shop on Great Jones Street. They'd rather we didn't tell you about it and they definitely don't want you to know their phone number.

SUSHI UO

Chef Ivy Stark of Dos Caminos chooses second floor Japanese restaurant Sushi UO for a place to take an adventurous eater. So concealed, if you didn't have the address, you wouldn't be able to find it.

BURGER JOINT

The Stanton Social chef Chris Santos likes to turn people onto the Burger Joint, tucked behind a curtain in the lobby of the Parker Meridien Hotel in Midtown.

TEHUITZINGO DELI & GROCERY

You could walk by this Hell's Kitchen deli a thousand times and never know they were serving some of the most affordable and authentic Mexican food in the city out of a taco window in the back of this bodega.

PDT (Please Don't Tell)

How could you expect people to keep their mouths shut about a cocktail lounge where you enter through an old wooden phone booth, inside of the hot dog joint Crif Dogs on St. Mark's Place? It's one of Gotham Bar & Grill chef Jason Hall's favorite haunts.

ANGEL'S SHARE

The other cocktail den Gotham Bar and Grill chef Jason Hall likes to hit is one of the granddaddies of stealthy entrances. You pass through a Japanese restaurant to get to this cocktail den.

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