One of the ways people pretend to be sophisticated about restaurants these days is by claiming that the New York City dining scene has lost its edge. The sheer number of restaurants in the city — about 27,000, according to the health inspectors — makes the argument absurd. How many of them are slipping? All of them? Just the first 20,000 or so?

In reality, people who gripe about the state of New York restaurants are usually talking about a sliver of a slice of a fraction, probably around 50 places whose names are in steady circulation, with the newest weighing most heavily in the results.

The number of really good ones is higher than anyone can count. Places that other cities would brag about get lost in the crowd here. The chef Günther Seeger, for instance, was a national star when he cooked in Atlanta. The tasting-menu restaurant he opened in the West Village three years ago should have been a major destination, especially after he dropped the prices. Mr. Seeger can make ingredients bend to his will almost without touching them. His cooking outshone that of some of the city’s more famous chefs, who whip their ingredients harder with far less payoff.

Yet he struggled to put Günther Seeger NY on the map. I reviewed it, but some other critics didn’t, and by the time it closed, last month, Chris Crowley of Grub Street wrote, “it wasn’t a restaurant you heard a lot of food geeks talk about.” Mr. Seeger complained to one acquaintance that he couldn’t even get on a list of New York’s 100 best restaurants.