Michelin, Zagat, the New York Times: all venerable sources for finding a city's "best" restaurant. But with the rise of social media and peer review sites, spots like Yelp, Trip Advisor and even OpenTable now release their own top restaurant lists, with the latter debuting their 2016 list yesterday.
OpenTable's 100 Best Restaurants in America for 2016, as voted on by verified diners who employ the reservation system, combed over 10,000,000 reviews of restaurants nationwide. Organized by state—though not every state gets a ranking, sorry Alaska and Rhode Island, among others—the list narrows down the best out of more than 24,000 restaurants where diners made reservations in the past year.
New York State gets a respectable 13 nods (we beat the state with the second most notable restaurants, California, by one restaurant) with eight in New York City proper.
Distinguished if staid spots like Daniel, Gramercy Tavern and The Modern made the cut, as did Per "Bong Water" Se. Sushi Nakazawa, the celebrate sushi spot that's expanding to a Trump property in DC, also made the list, as did the (ironically Boston-born) o ya Japanese restaurant.
Le Coucou, the brand new, upscale French restaurant that got a recent rave by the Times was hip enough to make the cut, the irony being it'll be months before anyone can get a reservation there. Trattoria L'incontro, an acclaimed Italian restaurant in Astoria, was the sole restaurant not based in Manhattan to make the list.
This list only looks at restaurants that are part of OpenTable's vast database of eateries, so if a business employes a competing operation like Resy, they're not making the list. Likewise if a restaurant doesn't take reservations at all, which may indicate why higher end restaurants are more likely to make a list of this kind as opposed to, say, a spot like Roberta's or one of many other mid-priced or inexpensive restaurants for which reservations don't apply or aren't accepted.
