America's Best Restaurant Cities: Esquire Magazine

[pesto]

A couple of thoughts: is there really any difference between NY, Chicago, SF and LA for food? I mean once you get a bunch of top level places, lots of ethnic and lots of experimentation, does it really matter if there are 80 great places or only 52; 8 Mexican regional cuisines or only 4? This is sort of like cleanliness: once you get to a certain point, cleaning more doesn't really improve anything. (LV is clearly thin in some areas and New Orleans I can't comment on.)

The ratings are quite subjective in any event. You can criticize a place serving "classical" cusine for any innovation it makes, even one that most would agree improves the food. A foodie friend in the SF area recently told me he could never go to a new "Tuscan" restaurant in the area again because they did not use proper Tuscan cups for the coffee. It's sort of like a dog show; you aren't finding the "best" dog, you are finding the one that meets a pre-existing model of what a certain type of dog "should" be like.

One strongly held belief: Mexican food in Europe is consistently terrible. By which I mean, not like Mexico or SoCal and certainly not better.