Le Bernardin: Still going strong.Photo: Danny Kim
For its March issue, Bon Appétit proffers a nifty and interactive feature on the top twenty restaurants that are at this moment doing significant things for food in America — you'll notice by calling them "important," the magazine avoids the pitfalls of adjectives like "best" or "trendiest" and pretty much opens up a new way of looking at restaurant culture altogether. "Restaurants," writes editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport, "more than movies or music or literature — are this generation's arbiters of taste." So how tasteful is the list? Let's take a look.
- 1. Momofuku
- 2. The Restaurant at Meadowood
- 3. Husk
- 4. Alinea
- 5. Manresa
- 6. Roberta's
- 7. Eleven Madison Park
- 8. Pok Pok
- 9. Mission Chinese Food
- 10. Uchi/Uchiko
- 11. Animal
- 12. Avec
- 13. Le Bernardin
- 14. Cochon
- 15. The Walrus and the Carpenter
- 16. Shake Shack
- 17. Franklin Barbecue
- 18. Balthazar
- 19. Primo
- 20. Swan Oyster Depot
In all, many of the usual suspects pop up here (ahem, Mission Chinese, ahem) along with a few unexpected surprises. (Balthazar, which gets a fun little "by-the-numbers" thing, seems to be the George Clooney of restaurants — handsome, ever-graying, respected by everyone.)
Two sidebars buffer the list: In one, chefs from the restaurant named above name their picks for most important restaurant; Dave Chang picks the Cheesecake Factory, for example. ("Seriously. They consistently make more people happy than any other restaurant.") In the other, editor Andrew Knowlton addresses the haters preemptively with a secondary list of heavy-hitters like Daniel that didn't make the cut, but even better, "have graduated to another level and inhabit a higher plane."
