Haven't we seen pretty much everything these last 20 years or so — thrills, spills, twists, turns, all at blinding speed. And here we are, just talking about the food.
Going back at least to the Great Recession, and nearly to the beginning of the century, cities across the United States have rapidly grown their respective restaurant cultures. Around 2020, when time slowed down, we found ourselves taking a few deep breaths, for a moment concerned less with what was new and next. Suddenly, any old restaurant would do, from the vintage Jewish delis of New York to the near-ancient pizzerias of New Haven and Trenton.
We didn't invent restaurants in 2009, after all. There were FOMO-provoking dishes long before social media had them traveling around the world, people planned vacations just to eat (do you even New Orleans?), and America had celebrity chefs and must-see cooking shows, back when it was mostly PBS doing the heavy lifting. And we are still so fortunate, truly, to have so many of those restaurants, and even some of the chefs, with us still, from that long-ago era. We're talking about the classic restaurants, which, let us say, for the sake of drawing a line, are the ones opened right around the millennium and earlier (ideally, way earlier.)
This nearly 17,000-word survey features nearly 250 restaurants, from furthest Alaska to sunny South Florida. It represents an attempt at examining each state's unique fingerprint on this vast, remarkably diverse thing that we call American food. It draws on years of experience traveling around the country on assignment, as well as the deep back catalog of Food & Wine's annual Best New Chefs and Best New Restaurants franchises, alongside countless feature articles.
Ultimately, think of this guide as a road map, or at least the rough sketch of one, like it were drawn on the back of a napkin, designed to jog your memory, or to push you toward a greater appreciation of our shared culinary heritage. Get out there while you can — we lost at least a dozen of our favorites since the last time Food & Wine published this list, in early 2020, and anyone with even one eye open knows one thing for certain: it's not getting any easier to run a restaurant.
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