When the end of the year rolls around, Food & Dining likes to take a quick look at new restaurants that, for one reason or another (the principal reason being X restaurants to cover and Y amount of time, where X > Y), we didn’t get around to covering.

Here are six such restaurants. We present them in speed-dating format: We’re not giving you each restaurant’s whole story, but there should be enough information here to discern whether you’re tempted to visit.

Most important, that’s six deletions from our to-do list — and hopefully six additions to yours.

— Phil Vettel

Gideon Sweet

Chefs Graham Elliot and Matthias Merges may be best known as big culinary brands on divergent paths. Elliot, wearing signature white framed glasses, was made a household name by starring on food television shows, including “MasterChef” and “Top Chef, while Merges quietly crafted exquisite establishments, including craft cocktail bar Billy Sunday and the Japanese street-food-inspired Yusho collection.

They first met nearly 20 years ago in the kitchen of the late, legendary Charlie Trotter’s restaurant, where Merges mentored wunderkind Elliot. Last month, the longtime chef friends opened Gideon Sweet in the West Loop, in the former Graham Elliot Bistro space.

Built as a cocktail bar and restaurant (and named after an endangered heirloom apple), it’s a showcase for renowned beverage consultant Alex Bachman, also a Trotter’s alum who worked with Merges’ Folkart restaurant group before going indie with his own company, Sole Agent.

Bachman’s “small pours” offer shot-glass-size cocktails meant to be sipped, or shot. The Bitters ($6), vintage 1970s era Germanic-style Boonekamp bitters with palm sugar and water, is one you should savor for its complex caramel notes.

At first sight, the food menu prices seem low in a neighborhood home to Googlers and $100 cheeseburgers — especially for the Okinawan sweet potato stack ($6) with coconut curry and cilantro salt. You’ll hear the Pavlovian drop into oil from the open kitchen before you’re rewarded with a towering tangle. Eat with chopsticks and make a mess, they’ll say. But you’ll soon abandon any utensils to take every crispy, crunchy, flavorful thread by your bare fingertips, to discover the fresh herbal layers feathered within. Resist the urge to grab it all by the fistful.

The grilled hamachi collar ($12) with yuzu glaze and sea salt is perfectly prepared, with a chip-crisp fin and succulent flesh. The caramel apple tart ($10) with Prairie Breeze cheddar ice cream and oat crumble is subtle and balanced.

But many of the other dishes, including the nashchen, the nightly changing nibbles brought around on trays, had a 1976 disco track running through my head, “More, more, more. How do you like it? How do you like it?” I loved every stunning, thoughtful and powerfully flavorful dish, but they were just so tiny.

Hopefully by the time weather permits the opening of the outdoor spaces in front and back, where they promise grills and a party every night, Gideon Sweet will fully ripen.

841 W. Randolph St., 312-888-2258, gideonsweet.com

— Louisa Chu