Restaurant of the Year

The Optimist, Atlanta

A soaring, convivial spot, the Optimist has a hopping oyster bar shaped like a surfboard, a first-rate cocktail program, and seafood cooked with old-school expertise over a wood fire. The term Optimist refers to a type of sailing dinghy used for teaching kids, and is an old moniker for a fisherman awaiting his next big catch. But judging from chef Ford Fry's exuberant cooking, it might also be a reference to his outlook on the world.

Fry already runs the admirable southern restaurant JCT. Kitchen & Bar, and he hosts the raucous annual Attack of the Killer Tomato Festival, so everybody knew his new place would be a big deal. But the Optimist is far more than a resounding local success: It is an overnight totem of all that is wonderful about American food today.

Start with the grandness of the space — its inspiration taken from a vintage photo of a seafood plant in Savannah. The main dining room, with a white wooden ceiling trussed with steel rods and a wall of wine and spirits behind a waxed-steel bar counter, seats 180, with booths covered in a gold wet-suit fabric. Every table is taken every night by a handsome, casually dressed crowd drinking signature cocktails and ordering frothy she-crab soup with shrimp toast, spicy glazed Spanish octopus with watermelon and coriander, and hearth-roasted red snapper in lime broth with herb salad that is somehow rich and bracing at once. If seafood can taste better than this, I can't wait to try it. Right now, the Optimist is American dining at its best, and that's why it's Esquire's 2012 Best New Restaurant of the Year.

914 Howell Mill Road; 404-477-6260; theoptimistrestaurant.com