5 Affordable Michelin-Starred Restaurants In New York City That Won't Break The Bank

Although one of New York City's nicknames is "the city that never sleeps," it should probably be changed to "the city that never stops eating." Food is a crucial component of life in the Big Apple, as you're never too far from a delicious, potentially world-class restaurant. For example, Stone Street is one of New York's oldest streets full of outdoor eateries. The city is home to over 60 Michelin-starred restaurants, illustrating its capacity for gourmet meals.

Best of all, while many Michelin restaurants are known for having expensive menus, not all of them will shrivel your wallet. To that end, we've compiled five of the most affordable Michelin spots within the city. Each of these places has one star, which is defined on the Michelin Guide's website as "High-quality cooking, Worth a stop!." When compiling this list, we tried to incorporate a variety of cuisines and chose restaurants with multiple menu options so you can pick and choose what you want rather than a pre-fixe dining experience. So, get your bib on and take a walking-eating tour of this iconic city.

Located about 17 blocks south of America's happiest tourist attraction, the Empire State Building, Casa Mono is the perfect restaurant for small plates and big appetites. As a Spanish tapas bar, you can sample a wide selection of different cuisines, meaning your taste buds will go on a culinary tour without ever leaving your chair.

The fact that these are small plates also helps with making Casa Mono more affordable. At the time of this writing, the dishes range from around $20 to $40. If you want a table full of tapas, you'll have to budget accordingly. Some of the menu's highlights include fresh burrata cheese, braised oxtail, duck eggs, scallops, pork belly, lamb belly, and skirt steak. The flavors are fresh and abundant, and each bite is unique. Plus, Casa Mono sources many of its ingredients from local farms for a better dining experience.

If you were to imagine a modern fine dining establishment, you'd probably come up with something like Francie. Despite its name, the restaurant doesn't specialize in French cuisine, nor does it look overly fancy. Instead, it's a relatively modest space that lets the food do most of the talking.

The menu isn't extensive, but it's full of delightful entrées and starters that will get your mouth watering before you can even order. Some examples include duck mortadella, littleneck clams, and pork cotoletta. In each case, you can practically taste the care and attention to detail with every bite. At the time of this writing, most of these dishes are firmly within the $30 to $40 range. The main courses (that are designed for sharing) are a little more expensive, and if you want to go all out for your Francie experience, you can get a crown of duck or prime rib that will look almost too good to eat.

Next on our list is Crown Shy, which is at the southern tip of Manhattan, close to iconic spots from your favorite movies (like the finance hub in the 2012 film "The Dark Knight Rises"). The menu of Crown Shy is as elegant as its surroundings, as the restaurant is in a fabulous Art Deco-style building in the heart of the finance district. The interior is sleek, minimalist, and relaxed.

Each dish highlights unique ingredients that dance and intertwine to create vibrant tastes on your tongue. It also features a blend of vegetarian selections, making it an ideal choice for all dining preferences. Some veggie-only dishes include gruyère fritters, acorn squash with fried rice, or crispy cauliflower with sherry and parmesan.

Meat lovers will appreciate the variety of options as well. You can enjoy oysters, beef carpaccio, jerk octopus, or jang glazed pork katsu for under $50, but as you move down the menu, the prices increase accordingly. After dinner, you can relax with a chocolate cake, sticky toffee pudding, or ice cream.

Once you see how Jeju does its noodles, you'll understand why it has a Michelin star. While the noodles themselves are exquisite, the toppings are the stars of the show, elevating a simple dish into something spectacular.

For example, a regular bowl of ramen is nothing special. However, when Jeju adds Wagyu beef, enoki, scallion oil, and chili beef ragu, it is akin to a five-star meal. That's something of a trend on Jeju's menu — combining simple ingredients with world-class ingredients to create an elegant twist on an old favorite.

Noodles are far from the only thing you can get here. Additionally, there's Korean-style fried chicken, lamb, lobster, and grilled ocean trout. Best of all, most of the menu is within $20 to $40, with only a few exceptions (like the aforementioned wagyu ramen or a full rack of lamb). With prices like this, Jeju could become a regular in your restaurant rotation.

If you were to map out the five restaurants on this list, you would almost make a complete circle. Apart from a quick trip across the Williamsburg Bridge to get to Francie in Brooklyn, each of these places is along the southern rim of Manhattan. These restaurants also offer a gastronomic tour of the globe, with our final stop in Southern India at Semma, which is just west of our starting location, Casa Mono.

If you're familiar with Indian cuisine, many of the menu's highlights will look familiar. There's kofta, dosa, and sukka, which offer a succulent array of herbs, spices, and regional flavors. Also, as you might expect from an Indian restaurant, there's a good selection of vegetarian and vegan choices (like the cauliflower-based dish, Mangalore huukosu, or the winter squash in kaikari kurma).

You don't need to be an Indian food connoisseur to understand why these dishes are so delicious. Reading through the ingredient list is enough to tempt your taste buds with items like ghee-roasted lamb chops, coconut chutney, tiger prawns, and foxtail millet. The a la carte menu ranges from around $20 to $60, creating an exquisitely affordable experience.

With plenty of Michelin-starred restaurants in New York, it's hard to narrow down any list to just the top five. However, we looked at a few key metrics when sorting ours, starting with the average price point. Overall, we wanted places that offered a variety of price points from low to high so everyone could enjoy an affordable meal. Places that had a minimum price of $50 or only offered a pre-fixe menu starting at over $100 were excluded.

Another consideration was the type of cuisine. Even though there were multiple affordable, high-quality Asian restaurants, we didn't want to favor one type of food over another. Each place we chose offers unique dishes and flavors. This way, diners can pick the spots that fit their palate preferences instead of feeling limited in their choices.

Finally, while we didn't exactly mean for these restaurants to be so close, it worked out that way. The idea was to choose places close to Manhattan, but proximity was our last consideration after price and cuisine. Now that you have these places in mind, happy eating!