By Regan Hofmann

We’re ready to declare 2012 the year of the death of the meal, and we couldn’t be happier about it. As more and more chefs embraced versatile dining, adding snacks to their menus, scaling down dishes or doing away with the old appetizer-entrée-dessert progression altogether, food got more inventive, more surprising and just plain better. For some, it was an opportunity to explore ideas that weren’t quite fully formed—instead of worrying about what the skillet cornbread should accompany, let people just order the bread and see if they like it. For others, it was a new challenge, a way to refocus their creativity after years of culinary success. And for indecisive diners (guilty as charged), it means you can order most of the menu without feeling like a monstrous glutton. From snacks to sandwiches, here are the ones you just have to try this year.

The samosa with chickpeas at Punjabi Deli (114 E. 14th St.) is a shockingly compact, intensely filling bowl of straight Indian comfort, a potato-and-pea samosa split, topped with a rich chickpea curry, tart chutneys and yogurt Jackson Pollock-ed over the top. It looks just awful, but after a bite, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world—oh, and it’s only $3.

The best Jewish deli sandwiches in New York are coming out of a Canadian kitchen, and we don’t care who hears us say it. All of the choices at Mile End Sandwich (53 Bond St., mileenddeli.com) are beyond reproach, but of them, The Beauty reigns supreme. It’s the apotheosis of the lox sandwich; a housemade, slightly sweet Montreal-style bagel, house-cured salmon, capers and thin-sliced red onion. There are no modernist flights of fancy here—the glory is in the classic elements’ flawless execution, in just the right proportions.

“Coffee tea with condensed milk toast” sounds like Menupages madlib, but is in fact the most exciting afternoon pick-me-up going. At Cha Chan Tang (45 Mott St.), the sleekest Hong Kong-style teahouse in Chinatown, bubble tea flavors range from the mundane to the exotic, but the best is this unlikely combination of two great tastes you had no idea went well together. Like a particularly strong Earl Grey minus the tannic edge, it’s excellent sipped alongside an inch-thick slice of soft white bread, barely toasted and drizzled with syrupy condensed milk.

Whatever you do, do not head directly for Bar Jamón (125 E. 17th St., casamononyc.com) to order the pan con tomate. Painful as the wait may be, hang on until summer, when tomatoes are back in season, to appreciate the pure genius of this deceptively simple Spanish mainstay. Grassy olive oil highlights the mellow sweetness of the perfectly ripe tomato smeared over crusty bread, the occasional heavy crystal of salt crackling on the tongue. Is it July yet?

M. Wells is dead; long live M. Wells! You’ll be pleased to know the fat-friendly, offal-loving mad genius of the dearly departed diner lives on in its new cafeteria home at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens). Word of advice: Scan the menu for the most baffling combination of words and order it. That’s how the chicken liver mousse with granola ended up on our table, an inspired savory take on the breakfast parfait. Salted pistachios, golden raisins, fried shallots and parsnip chips are bound together by a breathtaking scoop of creamy, funky mousse, a baffling combination that makes perfect sense on the first bite.

In a town that’s now got more steamed pork buns than hot dogs, Fun Buns (follow @funbunsnyc for locations) has somehow managed to rekindle the city’s affair with the mini meaty bites. The secret is their Taiwanese take; pork belly is braised in rock sugar and soy for a sweet, salty edge, then topped with sharp pickled mustard greens and chopped peanuts. It’s a brand-new flavor combination, enough to get New York to fall in love all over again.

In most of the United States, if all you knew about Spain came from the Spanish restaurants in your town, you’d be laboring under the impression that everyone in Spain listens exclusively to folk music, uses too much paprika and hasn’t yet reached the Iron Age, preferring to cook exclusively in terra cotta crocks. These are places to which you go out for tapas, apparently the staple food of Spaniards. Unlike many such national minstrel shows (the red-sauce Italian, moo-shu Chinese or plate-breaking Greek), these notions are based in a reality that continues to exist; however, they should never have come to represent a nation of millions.

In New York City, there is one kind of restaurant that is sorely lacking; one that is the bedrock of Spanish food culture. It’s a small, casual bar that just happens to serve better food than it needs to, a place where eating is not the point of your evening, it’s just an ever-present element thereof. You go out to meet friends, to talk, to hang out; you have some cheese, a plate of anchovies, a little bread to keep you going. Arguing about who makes the best pan con tomate and whether to get the squid or the chorizo may be most of the conversation, but you’ll never sit in front of a massive plate, taking photos and eating in silence until the next course comes. It’s aspirational living at its best, being incredibly exacting about food while treating it with the nonchalance it deserves.

This is what you get at Bar Jamón (125 E. 17th St., casamononyc.com), the round-the-corner companion to Mario Batali’s longstanding Casa Mono. The narrow, dark-wood-lined space is unforgivingly small, the room dominated by a winding, high-topped table and a narrow marble bar at the entry that also serves as wine display and prep space. Enormous mirrors cover the walls at both ends of the room, one marked in white with the menu, the other reflecting diners’ flushed, laughing faces back to them in the shimmer of candlelight.

It is a perfectly romantic location to put your date through a surreptitious battery of tests: Are they adventurous, or will they blanch when told that the “pulpo” in pulpo with spicy garbanzos is octopus (though you might let them—more for the rest of us!)? Can they appreciate a dish almost ludicrous in its simplicity like that pan con tomate, two slices of toasted bread smeared with olive oil and tomato pulp and a judicious scattering of chunky salt? It’s the best in the city precisely because of that simplicity, relying on the quality of the sharply green oil and obscenely red tomatoes rather than chef-y theatrics to dazzle.

Should your date fail the tests, there’s plenty to drown your sorrows in a wine list that is second to none for highlighting the varietals that are routinely overshadowed by dark red malbecs and tempranillos on most round-the-world wine lists. For a lighter way to spend your night, one of the Basque txakolis is the only way to go. What is otherwise an exceptionally well-balanced, mid-weight white is made sublime by its presentation: poured in a thin stream into a small carafe from as high as your waiter’s wingspan can manage, the aeration lending a slight effervescence that lurks without overpowering the palate. Like sparkling wines it pairs perfectly with rich, fatty foods like cheeses and the eponymous jamón, but as a heavier white it works just as well with brighter, more acidic foods like olives and stuffed piquillo peppers.

Whatever you do, don’t order all at once. Get one plate at a time, linger over your (generously sized) glass of wine, people-watch, have a real conversation with your companion. In other words, get Spanish.