RVR Named Esquire’s Best New Restaurant of 2025

From: Esquire
By: Jeff Gordinier, Joshua David Stein, and Amethyst Ganaway

What lures me back is an inexplicable pixie dust that occasionally turns a restaurant into a happening. I come back to RVR for the things that stay put on the menu, such as the house pickles and the Santa Barbara uni hand roll and the duck meatballs and the baby bok choy with sesame tonnato, and I come back to catch the seasonal delights that float in and out, such as a persimmon salad with orange-fleshed fruit so ripe it seemed to blaze like a lamp. Robinson and Lett have created RVR as a mash note from California to Japan—the listening bars with stacks of old vinyl, the highballs, the sake, the respect for nature, the sacredness of community—and the only logical response is to reciprocate that love again and again.

This year at Esquire we’ve seen dozens of new restaurants like this, places where spectacular food is coupled with a damn good time—where ambition and abandon meet. These are the places you hate to leave, but when you do, you leave full. Full of some of the most deeply personal food you can remember eating, full of joy and ideas and hope. You stumble out, way past your bedtime, practically dancing in the street.

Sunny’s, for instance, is the most fun of a new generation of American steakhouses, with none of the traditional dick swinging but all of the swagger. In Oakland, after the last cheese-frosted pies are served, a place called June’s Pizza turns into an after-hours dance bender, with vintage speakers making even the oven jump. We’ve seen this again and again in 2025: At places like RVR in Los Angeles, Side A in San Francisco, Lupe’s Situ Tacos in Seattle (where the chef is actually a local rock drummer), and Kabawa in New York City (where the playlist deserves a Grammy) this has been the Year of the Good Time. A good time not in an “ostrich in the sand” way or in a “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” mode. A good time founded on the recognition that good times—with friends around a table, breaking bread—are more important than ever in chaotic, topsy-turvy years like these. —Joshua David Stein

During my decade at Esquire, people have often asked me how a restaurant qualifies for this list. While we do refer to a loose rubric known as “the five C’s”—we’re looking for a sweet spot of hospitality that incorporates comfort, creativity, cool, community, and (of course) excellent cooking—the ultimate answer is pretty simple. This list is a compendium of restaurants that, one, we really want to go back to and, two, we keep sending our friends to.

RVR, a dynamic twenty-first-century izakaya from a team led by chefs Travis Lett and Ian Robinson, chimes each of the C’s with the resonance of a gong. And it’s got a backstory, which never hurts. Lett, the New Jersey–bred surfer who transformed Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard by opening Gjelina back in 2008, had always dreamed of opening a Japanese restaurant that reflected his upbringing. That might sound odd—“Clearly I’m not Japanese,” Lett says—but his parents adhered to a macrobiotic diet and Lett grew up with a home larder full of miso and dashi and umeboshi and udon. He grew up, too, with a mother who’d drive hours to buy ingredients from local farms.

RVR, as a farm-to-table izakaya a few blocks from a beach, is a manifestation of all that.

But that’s not what keeps me coming back with friends and family members in tow because I really want them to experience it. What lures me back is an inexplicable pixie dust that occasionally turns a restaurant into a happening. I come back to RVR for the things that stay put on the menu, such as the house pickles and the Santa Barbara uni hand roll and the duck meatballs and the baby bok choy with sesame tonnato, and I come back to catch the seasonal delights that float in and out, such as a persimmon salad with orange-fleshed fruit so ripe it seemed to blaze like a lamp. Robinson and Lett have created RVR as a mash note from California to Japan—the listening bars with stacks of old vinyl, the highballs, the sake, the respect for nature, the sacredness of community—and the only logical response is to reciprocate that love again and again. —Jeff Gordinier