City: New Haven, CT

Category: Restaurants

Telephone: (203) 503-3919

Address: 1157 Chapel St.

Description: The glass vestibule leads you into a restaurant that is clean and open, like a modern library for food. The chef trained with Todd English, but the menu is not Italian. Instead, you’ll find old favorites re-imagined, like cool buttermilk corn soup, crispy farm okra, local butter clam pan roast, and duck sausage with caramelized potato. You never know what you’ll find on this seasonally changing menu, like bacon-wrapped dates and pistachios, asparagus and buffalo mozzarella, or salmon with sorrel sauce. There is a bar next to the restaurant where you can get small plates, though most of the so-called small plates at Heirloom could be meals themselves. This is one of the many cutting-edge restaurants in New Haven serving creative food that still tastes like something Mom would make. If your mom was a classically trained French chef, that is.