Every January, just after New Year's, I set out across America in search of what we at GQ call the Perfect Night Out. What does that mean? Well, that's a good question. The easy part of the answer is that I'm looking for superlative restaurants that have opened in the past 12 to 18 months, the places we deem the best newcomers in the land. What makes them “perfect” is more complicated, and figuring that out for myself anew is, in some ways, precisely the purpose of each year's travel. I could give you a list of traits that the new restaurants I love nearly always display: ambition, artistry, heart, style, humor, familiarity, surprise, comfort, conscientiousness, craft—in addition to the more traditional restaurant qualities through which those are filtered, like deliciousness, hospitality, value, service, design, and so on. But the exact way in which any number of those will come together in a particular space, on a particular night, in a way that makes you say, “This. This is the only place in the world I want to be eating right now”—that remains something of a wonderful mystery.

Which is what gave me hope in a year that provided abundant reasons to be depressed about dining out, even to wonder whether restaurants should still exist at all. There have been times when it's seemed that behind every inviting dining room lies, as Boston Globe critic Devra First memorably put it, “a Hieronymus Bosch tableau of struggling operators, lascivious chefs, and broke staffers.” To those who believe the only answer is to burn it all down, the 13 new restaurants in which I enjoyed this year's Perfect Nights Out—not to mention dozens of others that offered wonderful moments and meals—are, to my mind, the best argument for why restaurant culture is worth fighting to change, so that restaurants may live on.

Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em.

The other purpose of my annual journey—this year, nearly 75 restaurants across 18 cities—is to try to tease out a picture of the dining moment, some overarching theme or through line that sums up what it means to eat out in America today. This year, I threw up my hands. On an eight-degree January day in Chicago, in search of where things might be headed, I stopped into a new branch of a fast-casual dumpling chain billed as the city's first totally automated dining experience. It was fun ordering on a touch screen and then watching a bank of high-tech Automat windows for my name to appear alongside little dancing cartoon dumplings. Then the one visible employee, tasked with helping customers order while the rest presumably toiled backstage, leaned in over my shoulder and whispered: “It's the future, bro.” My first reaction was feeling like that eight-degree wind had just blown through my body. My second was to think, Get in line, bro. Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em. We've got more futures than we know what to do with—big, small, formal, casual, avant-garde, nostalgic, all of it up for grabs. (You get a taste of the schizophrenia in the taxonomic mania that has overtaken menus: HOT SMALL PLATES, SMALL COLD PLATES, SNACKS, BITES; FROM THE LAND; FROM THE SEA; FROM THE FIRE. Or perhaps monsieur would just like something from BOWLS?) With a few gloriously messy exceptions, the restaurants I love are ones that approach the question with some kind of clarity, a purposeful path through the clutter. The other great part of my job, of course, is that no two of those paths ever seem to be quite the same.

Santa Barbara Uni at Majordōmo. The lively bar at Majordōmo in L.A.'s Chinatown.

This was the year I saw perhaps the last thing I expected to see in any restaurant, anywhere: a comment card in a David Chang restaurant. This one came with the check at Majordōmo in Los Angeles, where Chang has been spending more and more of his time. “How did we do?” it asked cheerily, followed by a range of smiley faces like those on the International Pain Scale. None of them showed a face contorted in the kind of anguish I imagined a younger Chang might have felt had he been able to look ahead to this moment. Chang, to quickly refresh, began his career as the very embodiment of client- directed hostility. Momofuku was the Kingdom of No: to substitutions, to seat backs, to dessert, to photos. Had it not been for the inconvenience of his being in the food-selling business, you got the feeling he might have done away with customers altogether.

Well, we all grow up.