Kalbi Taco Shack, which occupies a modest storefront in the city's achingly hip Cherokee Street district, puts a multigenerational spin on Korean-Mexican fusion. Owner Sue Wong-Shackelford is the daughter of chefs — her mother worked at a Chinese restaurant, her father a Polynesian one — and she and her own daughter have tweaked some of her parents' recipes for Kalbi's menu of tacos, burritos, quesadillas, rice bowls, and banh mi.

The ramen craze has finally reached St. Louis, but among the shops that have opened over the past year or so, six-month-old Vista Ramen has set itself apart. Chef Chris Bork didn't emulate tonkotsu or other traditional broths but built his own from dashi, ham hocks, pig's feet, chicken bones, and Granny Smith apple. Bork has also earned praise for non-ramen dishes like pork ribs encrusted with caramelized fish sauce and crab paste.

Empire-builder Ben Poremba's eventful 2016 — he installed a new executive chef at his acclaimed flagship Elaia and opened Parigi, an Italian restaurant — continued in November with the debut of the Mexican restaurant Nixta. Executive chef Tello Carreon, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico, draws on family recipes (like his grandmother's mole) as well as a more modern sensibility (as in a version of the Oaxacan dish tlayuda with burrata and a carrot-coriander salsa).

James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Gerard Craft stunned the St. Louis dining scene in June when he announced he would close his flagship restaurant Niche and replace it with the more casual, Italian-influenced Sardella. The gamble seems to have paid off: not one month after Sardella's November debut, one local publication has already declared it 2016's best new restaurant. Sardella serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a menu that ranges across the moment, from a farro bowl with kimchi and a fried egg to uni carbonara.

Olive + Oak opened in January in the picturesque Old Webster section of suburb Webster Groves, and it remains one of the most sought-after reservations in town, with prime tables booked weeks in advance. Executive chef Jesse Mendica serves a lengthy menu of contemporary American fare, with an emphasis on seafood (stuffed clams with lardo, blue-crab gratin with Calabrian chiles) and steaks.

Few observers would have expected a restaurant attached to a Holiday Inn along a heavily trafficked suburban thoroughfare — a space previously home to a biker-themed breastaurant — to generate much buzz, but Twisted Tree Steakhouse is packing in diners with its pomp-free approach to traditional steakhouse fare. Twisted Tree's aging process is unique for the area: steaks are aged using a combination of the wet and dry methods for as many as 150 days.

Can you open a hip breakfast restaurant in 2016 with neither toast nor grain bowls as the main attraction? Yolklore suggests it's possible. No one adjective quite captures what Yolklore serves. The menu veers from the “Nest Egg” (eggs, bacon, and cheese in a buttermilk-biscuit crust with preserved lemon and pickled red onion) to a breakfast burrito with a pancake used in place of the tortilla to a classic platter with bacon, eggs, potatoes, and a biscuit.

A photo posted by @ironstef on Nov 5, 2016 at 12:38pm PDT

Someday the St. Louis barbecue boom will end. That day did not occur in 2016. Of this year's crop of new barbecue restaurants, Big Baby Q and Smokehouse is the critical darling and has made a small, dowdy strip mall in the northwest suburb of Maryland Heights a culinary destination. For his first restaurant, industry veteran Ben Welch has partnered with his father, Bennie, and the duo are serving beef brisket, pork ribs, pulled pork, turkey, pastrami, and other barbecue standards.