America's food renaissance keeps expanding, in all kinds of creative directions—not all of them fancy. From a $20 million gamble in Manhattan to a desolate block in Oakland, our tireless food correspondent, Alan Richman, crisscrossed the country in search of the best and tastiest this land has to offer. Start booking those tables now!
1. Lincoln in New York, NY
Almost Instantly, America's Most Intelligent Italian Restaurant
Jonathan Benno has emerged from behind the Iron Curtain—the mercilessly precise kitchen of Thomas Keller's Per Se, where he labored brilliantly as chef de cuisine. The word around town was that he was ready to slow down and cook simple Italian food. Not him. He remains uncompromising. He's the boss at Lincoln, preparing food almost as exacting as that at Per Se, maybe because there's so much on the line: his own impeccable reputation as well as a reported $20 million investment by the Patina Group. Lincoln is a glass-and-steel structure on the plaza of Lincoln Center, looking a little like a chalet and a little like a three-dimensional rhomboid. With its grass-covered roof, wooden interior ceiling, and multitude of dining areas, some open and some intimate, you might feel as if you're tucked away in the mountains of Manhattan.
Benno's food is rigorously Italian but comes in a multitude of styles: Lasagna and eggplant parmigiana are idealized but still lusciously gooey. A few main courses suggest the meticulousness of Per Se, although friends insist I'm wrong, claiming Benno's style here is warmer. His pastas, particularly the uni-and-crab rigati (short tubes, curved and ridged), taste more Italian than I'd expect from a non-Italian. (He isn't one, even though his name ends in a vowel.) In an era when Italian food in America is about overwhelming gusto and over-the-top portions, Benno's food is remarkably thoughtful. With Marea (number one in our Best New Restaurants survey last year) only a few blocks away, it seems the Upper West Side is becoming the Italian-food capital of America.
Jonathan Benno has emerged from behind the Iron Curtain—the mercilessly precise kitchen of Thomas Keller's Per Se, where he labored brilliantly as chef de cuisine. The word around town was that he was ready to slow down and cook simple Italian food. Not him. He remains uncompromising. He's the boss at Lincoln, preparing food almost as exacting as that at Per Se, maybe because there's so much on the line: his own impeccable reputation as well as a reported $20 million investment by the Patina Group. Lincoln is a glass-and-steel structure on the plaza of Lincoln Center, looking a little like a chalet and a little like a three-dimensional rhomboid. With its grass-covered roof, wooden interior ceiling, and multitude of dining areas, some open and some intimate, you might feel as if you're tucked away in the mountains of Manhattan.
Benno's food is rigorously Italian but comes in a multitude of styles: Lasagna and eggplant parmigiana are idealized but still lusciously gooey. A few main courses suggest the meticulousness of Per Se, although friends insist I'm wrong, claiming Benno's style here is warmer. His pastas, particularly the uni-and-crab rigati (short tubes, curved and ridged), taste more Italian than I'd expect from a non-Italian. (He isn't one, even though his name ends in a vowel.) In an era when Italian food in America is about overwhelming gusto and over-the-top portions, Benno's food is remarkably thoughtful. With Marea (number one in our Best New Restaurants survey last year) only a few blocks away, it seems the Upper West Side is becoming the Italian-food capital of America.
2. Flour + Water in San Francisco, CA
The Neighborhood Restaurant You Want in Your NeighborhoodReservations are tough. Lines are long—half the tables are saved for walk-ins. The music is too loud; techno the night I ate there. The servers look as though they're ready to toss aside their order pads and dance. The design appears to be a mélange of Wild West and Arts and Crafts. Nothing hints at the brilliance of the dishes. You might think you're eating unusually intricate comfort food if you drop by for a casual dinner. Pay more attention and you'll become aware of the originality of the recipes, the care that's gone into sourcing from small farms: The ricotta is made in-house. The meats are butchered in-house.
Flour + Water is sneakily sophisticated, with remarkable ingredients and stunning layers of flavor that don't stray from easy-to-eat. San Francisco produces the most fascinating pizza toppings on earth, and these are among the best: bone marrow, Fontina cheese, broccoli-rabe leaves, and fresh horseradish on one; tomato, spiced pork, olives, caciocavallo cheese, and salmoriglio—an Italian condiment, green and tangy—on another. Chef Thomas McNaughton says his secret is "to think of pizza as a dish." There's more. Pork is braised in whey. Roasted Thumbelina carrots come agrodolce—that's sweet-and-sour. Everybody loves informal Italian dining. Flour + Water might be as good as it gets.
3. The Kitchen at Brooklyn Fare in Brooklyn, NY
All of a Sudden, the Toughest Table in New YorkFive nights a week, chef César Ramirez offers the most outrageously fabulous meals in New York, prepared and served in a space that also acts as the prep kitchen of a grocery store on the same block. When I went early last year, the total number of seats was twelve. Recently he expanded to eighteen, and his partners have sprung for a seven-figure renovation. Yes, that's $1 million for one small room. It gleams. The food is of the moment and of the market, downtown Brooklyn's take on the chef's table.
Ramirez, an ex–David Bouley protégé, is always there cooking, putting out at least twenty small courses, each a bite or three, aided by two assistants and a fellow by the name of Marcilino, the hardest-working dishwasher in New York. The food is close to French but has inspired twists—jumbo lump crab encased in kataifi (a Middle Eastern play on shredded wheat), bluefin toro in mustard-seed sauce, a Kumamoto oyster with grapefruit gelée and crème fraîche, bacalao with cod roe and microplaned black truffle. On my visit, Ramirez told the small assemblage that he refused to lower his standards, that his single goal was perfection. I don't think we would have failed to recognize that on our own.
4. The Tasting Kitchen in Venice, CA
Free-Form French, with Italian Variants and a Sushi-Style SensibilityI wasn't impressed, not at first. Certainly not by the menu. "Very confusing. I apologize," the waiter admitted. To be honest, he didn't seem all that coherent, either. When I told him I had no idea what to order, he suggested I trust the chef, Casey Lane. You hear that in sushi bars, where it's generally not about trust. It's about taking orders from a surly Japanese chef. I said okay. Nothing to lose. That's when the experience changed. The Tasting Kitchen became a less ceremonious version of L'Astrance, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris.
The food: creamy, complex, and compelling. The wines: exquisitely matched. That waiter: suddenly transformed into a mastermind, particularly with whites. You might not have had a Listán Blanco from the Canary Islands. (Before this meal, neither had I.) Lane sent out mussels with fennel pollen in broth as rich as cream soup, tagliatelle with plum-marinated pork, butter-and-vermouth-braised halibut with chanterelles. The only break from richness was two different salads, the lettuces piled high, accented with beautifully biting vinaigrettes. The desserts, decadence from three countries: English trifle, Italian brown-sugar budino, French plum galette. This meal at the Tasting Kitchen was a tour de force. It's too decadent for the Beverly Hills crowd but ideal for Venice, where anything amazing is allowed.
5. Grüner in Portland, OR
What's a Restaurant Like This Doing in a Place Like PortlandOut of the chaos of modern West Coast dining comes an establishment in touch with Germanic and Alsatian gastronomy. You don't see that in Oregon. It's incongruous, almost inconceivable. The room doesn't look Central European—it's austere, with plenty of blond wood, steel, and glass. The food is all about comfort, the old-world way. The chicken with spaetzle is velvet softness. The golden trout tasted golden, if you can imagine that. I was able to nab only one slice of tarte flambée, the Alsatian pizza, because my guests gobbled it up. The Swabian ravioli stuffed with spinach, beef, and pork was so satisfying I regret years spent visiting Florence instead of Stuttgart. A radish salad was accented with pumpkin-seed oil, a specialty of Graz, the hometown of Arnold himself. My bill came in a Penguin edition of Goethe—Faust (Part Two). Grüner is a harmonious performance by chef Christopher Israel, a maverick who has brought Mitteleuropa to the land of microbreweries.
6. The Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle, WA
See What the Boys (and Girls) in the Back Room Will HaveA pitch-perfect oyster bar, and more. You walk down a long hallway to a half-hidden door where a cheerful young maître d' seats you in a room that's joyous, lively, and oh so cramped. It's filled with the same diners who eat pork belly in New York City, except they're slurping oysters here. The Walrus and the Carpenter feels like a throwback to an earlier era of Seattle dining. It reminds me of the once wonderful Pike Place Market, long before it got touristy and bland.
Atop the zinc bar are wire baskets filled with chopped ice and fresh oysters. (I liked the Skookums.) There's so much else: fried oysters thickly breaded and accompanied by a cilantro aioli. Beef tartare with raw egg yolk. Silken chicken-liver mousse with pickled chanterelles and pickled apricots. And my favorite savory course, smoked trout with pickled red onions on a lentil salad studded with walnuts. The panna cotta was so light I was thinking of eating a half-dozen portions, the way I ate a half-dozen oysters. This kind of restaurant should define Seattle dining, even if Seattle is always striving for fancier digs.
7. Uchiko in Austin, TX
Fruit 'n' Fish, the New Fun Flavor CombinationThe Americanization of Japanese food has rarely been so appealing. (Nobu Matsuhisa invented the concept more than twenty years ago, though his unsurpassed style was more traditional and somewhat South American.) The sushi chefs standing before me spoke English to one another, maybe because one was Thai, the other Vietnamese. The Thai guy said to me, "The chef, Tyson Cole, he's a white guy." My sushi waitress was straight out of the University of Florida. I started with brilliant watermelon sashimi—watermelon and maguro (red tuna) look alike. The fruit came thinly sliced, with spices, herbs, and sea salt.
Even more wonderful was Hama Chili, hama being slang for yellowtail, or hamachi. The raw fish came in an orange-oil ponzu sauce, with Thai chilies and skinless, pitless orange slices. Hard to imagine fish being this refreshing. The sushi toppings were distinctive and daring: flounder topped with candied quinoa; hamachi with jalapeños; Alaska weathervane scallops—a variation on farm-raised—with lime, salt, and pepper. Cooked food was impressive, too. Grilled mackerel was paired with huckleberry coulis, onions, and bluefoot mushrooms, all powerful enough to tame one of the strongest-tasting fish. Although a bottle of soy sauce sat on the counter, the combinations were so vivid I wasn't tempted to add a drop.
8. Menton in Boston, MA
A Chef from the Projects Gets PoshLong ago, when Barbara Lynch got her first important job, cooking for Todd English in Cambridge, she couldn't find her way to work and said to him, "Who puts a restaurant in this [expletive] place?" She's changed since growing up in the Southie projects. She's now one of Boston's most celebrated chefs, with one of Boston's fanciest restaurants. Menton is cool, minimalist, all blacks, whites, and grays, not a hint of color in the dining room. The servers are so discreet they seldom talk to the table, preferring to lean in and have a conversation with each diner. The patrons are living up to the restaurant—I can't recall seeing such a nicely dressed dinner crowd in America's worst-dressed city. The food tends toward upscale French, lush and rich. The meat preparations stand out, particularly the thick, juicy slab of pheasant and the tender, barely gamy Scottish hare, presented rare. Menton is gracious, serious, luxurious, and very un-Boston.
9. Commis in Oakland, CA
Neighborhood Haute Cuisine on a Most Improbable BlockAcross the street from Commis is Anatoly's Men's Clothing, new suits for $99. (Not cheap enough? Take advantage of the liquidation sale.) An unlikely locale for a restaurant with SoHo savoir faire: stark and simple, with opaque glass and no name on the door. Commis is a block buster, a neighborhood-changer, a primal economic and cultural force. Whether or not it's embraced by locals, it has to be admired for venturing where nobody is used to paying serious prices for food. The kitchen staff works out front, behind a tiny counter, eerily silent—as is the entire restaurant. Our amuse-bouche was a slow-poached yolk of mysterious consistency, not solid or runny, suspended in a savory onion cream, with smoked-date puree and malt. Pork jowl, obscenely fatty, the way everyone likes it, came with both brined and not-brined lettuce. (I preferred the not.) So much tranquillity made me desperate to shatter the hush, yell out, "Hey, there's a sale at Anatoly's—anybody want to join me?"
10. Longman & Eagle in Chicago, IL
A First: Fine Dining Goes Neo-FlophouseThe way I heard it from my waiter, Longman & Eagle—the name pays tribute to a statue in nearby Logan Square—aspires to become a flophouse. You've got to admit, that's an uncommon ambition. The way he explained it, that state of disrepute will be achieved once the planned "six crummy rooms" are completed and available for overnight stays. Longman & Eagle has two dining areas, wildly dissimilar. The back one looks like it was decorated by an 11-year-old with crayons.
The front room, substantially more popular, has an unpainted plank ceiling, black tables, rusted industrial lamps, exposed pipes, a few plants, and no art except that found on the bodies of the customers, primarily unshaven hipsters lured there by a wide-ranging beer-and-booze list. The food is high-end gastropub. Our meal began with an amuse-bouche of raw grouper, an amenity you don't see in many flophouses. A considerable number of dishes were triumphant, including spicy frogs' legs with a blue-cheese dip; smoked sweetbreads; chicken-liver mousse; and a sunny-side-up duck egg with tongue hash and truffle vinaigrette. I'd gladly spend the night if that tongue hash were on the breakfast menu.
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