About the New York Times' Best Restaurants List
Something that I used to have to think about more or less all the time when I was still employed in food media was the question of what was best. The best bakery, the best restaurant, the best bar, the best all-day cafe, the best bagel/pizza/breakfast sandwich/matzo/pie/soft serve/vegan ice cream/kale salad/restaurant veggie burger/freezer section veggie burger/hot chocolate/roasted brassica/restaurant toilet.
Truly, there was no job too small when it came to what was best. Whenever I left home to put food in my mouth, whether on the clock or not, I subconsciously filed away whatever I ate for potential inclusion on some theoretical Best Of list. I became less human and more ambulatory spreadsheet, always busy building categorized hierarchies in my mind.
And then I got laid off from my last food media job and, for all intents and purposes, stopped eating out. In a city of some 28,000 restaurants, I go to only one with anything like regularity. Asking me for the best [insert food item/restaurant here] is like asking me what color underwear I wore last Thursday: I will smile at you and probably drool slightly as I try in vain to remember.
It's not that I stopped liking restaurants, or food that I don't make with my bare hands. (I disagree with those who somewhat righteously proclaim that the best restaurant is your own kitchen — it's not, and it would probably be shut down by the health department.) It's more that at some point, between the cost of dining out and my steadfast aversion to the act of making reservations, restaurants began to feel like lymphatic drainage facials or an impromptu trip to Costa Rica: accessible in theory, aspirational in practice.
Scrolling through the New York Times's just-published list of the 100 Best Restaurants in NYC brought that feeling home, along with a few others. To be clear, I think it's a good list, one that does an impressive job at gesturing to the overwhelming variety of cuisines and restaurants crammed into the city's five boroughs. Ligaya Mishan did her work, and I am not here to shit on it.
I'm not even here to ask who this list is for, because I know that a) a lot of restaurants on it will benefit from their inclusion and b) a lot of people who are not me live for this kind of list.
If I'm here for anything, it's to share the observation that scrolling the list now feels like scrolling the Times's annual 52 Places list, insofar as I will never go to probably 98 percent of the places on it. I am as likely to visit Penang as Jean-Georges; both are equally removed from my day-to-day reality.
That's not so much a reflection on how expensive dining out has become as how my own thinking has changed. A decade ago, I would have attempted to go to as many spots as possible on the list, and been far more inclined to nitpick it. Now, I no longer think in terms of bests. If there's anything that being paid to do so taught me, it's that the "best" is a hollow designation, because once you've culled the obviously bad and mid from consideration, you're left with what is very good, and forced to choose between equals, the best becomes a coin flip.
Someone once said, on the heated topic of bagels, that the best bagel shop in the city is the one closest to your home. I believe this with my entire soul. Because the "best," at best, is both illusion and delusion; at worst, it's an exhausting reminder of the meaningless of our existence. A part of me is wistful for the days that required me to ingest 20 cups of hot chocolate to determine the city's finest. The rest of me is happy to sit here at home, eating a perfectly acceptable bagel from my neighborhood shop, and feeling blissfully unmotivated to find out if there's a slightly better one somewhere else.
What I'm consuming this week:
Reading: Brawler, Lauren Groff's beautiful new story collection.
Watching: Light Sleeper, Paul Schrader's moody 1992 thriller about a drug dealer trying to take stock of his life.
Listening: Neko Case's Tiny Desk concert.
