Watch Heat Seekers

The Bombay Bread Bar serves delicately balanced Indian food unlike anything in New York. The menu advances Bombay street food, featuring snacky dishes like bhelpuri and black coriander shrimp, along with new takes on classics like saag paneer pizza.

The underrepresentation of Cambodian cuisine in the US became an opportunity for chef Nite Yun to Open Nyum Bai. The walls of the Oakland restaurant are covered in rare 1960s Cambodian rock records, and filled with the smells of a Cambodian kitchen.

Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby are rock stars within the plant-based culinary scene, with a laundry list of hit Philadelphia restaurants like Vedge. After setting their sights outside Philly, they landed on D.C. as the perfect place for their new location.

Chef Jason Vaughn's goal is to make food that anyone can have a soulful connection with, whether they grew up eating it or not. At Nancy's Hustle that may take form in a corn porridge sourdough, Turkish lamb dumplings or their namesake dish Nancy Cakes.

At Canard in Portland, Oregon, Chef Gabriel Rucker loves to play with high-brow low-brow food. He matches cheesy steamed White Castle-style burgers with foie gras dumplings and fancy French pastries like the Paris-Brest.

Historically, tasting menus mean two things: overpriced dishes and unapproachable dishes. However, Cadence, located in Philadelphia's flourishing South Kensington neighborhood, breaks from the expected, with a four-course menu that clocks in at just $65.

Husband and wife team Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis didn't set out to open a Middle Eastern restaurant to mimic what you would find in the Middle East. They opened Bavel to showcase the flavors of their backgrounds that they grew up loving.

What's not to love about pasta, pizza and ice cream? Renzo in Charleston, South Carolina, takes these simple staples of any childhood diet to the next level with upgraded ingredients and playful spins.

Sean Fredericks and his wife spent a few years in Georgia with the Peace Corps and grew to love the food. That's why he opened Kargi Gogo in Portland, so he could share dishes like khachapuri, kubdari and khinkali dumplings with the people of Oregon.