Note: This is 2019's ranking of America's best restaurants. For the 2020 ranking, please click here.

What makes a good restaurant a “best”? Food that’s better than just good, of course. A dining room and a level of service that suit the quality of what’s on the plate. A good wine list (which doesn't always mean an encyclopedic one) and good beers and/or cocktails where appropriate. And then the less easily quantifiable stuff: personality, imagination (or intelligent commitment to a lack of same) and consistency. We’re proud to present our ninth annual ranking of the 101 Best Restaurants in America.

101 Best Restaurants in America 2019 Gallery

When we were a young website, way back in 2011, we drew up our first ranking ourselves, making a list of the places where we, The Daily Meal’s editors, liked to eat. Taking into consideration our mood, our budget, and where we happened to be when we got hungry, we considered various criteria: Would we vote with only our critical faculties, or with our mouths and our wallets as well? Where would we send friends? Where would we want to dine if we had one night in this city or that?

By this method, we ended up with a shortlist of 150 places. Then we argued, advocated, and cajoled each other on behalf of restaurants ranging from old-fashioned to avant-garde, ultra-casual to super-fancy. Finally, we invited an illustrious panel of judges (restaurant critics, food and lifestyle writers, and bloggers) from across America to help order restaurants via an anonymous survey, and we tallied the results to assemble a ranked list.

The following year, we refined the process and made it less about our own preferences and more about those of the growing number of writers and other food-conscious folk who were contributing to the site or commenting on what other people contributed. Since 2012, then, our 101 best have been chosen by a voting pool that includes our special contributors, members of The Daily Meal Council (excluding chefs and restaurateurs), and a growing list of other panelists who have agreed to participate in the ever-increasing number of “Best” surveys we conduct.

For this year’s 101, we reached out to hundreds of restaurant experts of various stripes around the country, asking them to vote on an admittedly rather long “shortlist” of more than 700 establishments. Here are the results.

The task of choosing our nation’s best restaurants — as our panelists would surely tell you — becomes more difficult every year, because the number of excellent places to eat continues to grow. As our interest in, and appreciation of, good food continues to increase — and as more great chefs train more younger good ones — fantastic food continues to spread across America. Exceptional culinary landscapes in big cities get better, while new and different dining scenes in every corner of the country are born, in turn attracting and inspiring more talented cooks. All this makes trying to rank the country’s best restaurants more and more challenging, but also more and more worthwhile and intriguing.

You’ll find many of the expected names on this list — restaurants run by Daniel Boulud, Wolfgang Puck, José Andrés, Thomas Keller, Danny Meyer, and other luminaries of today's American restaurant scene. You’ll find Italian places both unorthodox (Animal) and extravagant (Per Se). Some of the nation’s most celebrated and refined Japanese restaurants are included (Masa and O Ya, among others). Carnivores will delight at finding places like Peter Luger and Roast, while those more piscatorially inclined will savor Pêche. Our No. 1 choice won't surprise anybody who follows fine cooking in America.

As we do every year, we expect to hear complaints about this ranking, not just because any list of this kind is subjective to a degree, no matter how many experts weigh in, but also because we haven't included any of the doubtless excellent restaurants in, say, Providence, Charlotte, the Twin Cities — or any of the hundreds of smaller towns across the U.S. where good cooking is practiced and skillfully run dining rooms are pleasing devoted clienteles.

But here's the thing: There are more than 600,000 restaurants in America, counting fast-food outlets, fast-casual chains, small places where the food might be fine but the amenities are slim, and places with no particular pretensions to quality at all. Bracket all these out and we’ve still got — what? — maybe four or five thousand places that are striving to be “best restaurants” and possibly think they already are.

Our list has room for only a tiny fraction of these, and when we reach out to our panel of some of the top restaurant critics and critical diners in America, the places they voted for — perhaps not surprisingly — tend to be concentrated in those cities that are (for reasons that are probably cultural as well as economic) renowned as “food towns.” Chief among these are Las Vegas (four restaurants), New Orleans (five restaurants), Los Angeles (eight restaurants), Chicago (12 restaurants), San Francisco (13 restaurants), and New York City (16 restaurants). Those are the places where our panelists have found the most top restaurants, because those are the places that the most talented chefs and restaurateurs from other regions gravitate to, and the places with large crowds of enthusiastic (and often well-heeled) customers to encourage them and make them profitable. We realize that there are more than 70 urban areas in the United States with populations of 500,000 and above, all of them chock-full of restaurants — but does every one of them have even a place or two that can really be compared with America’s best? Even now, probably not — though we did find top restaurants in such places as Oxford, Mississippi; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Los Gatos, California (among other less expected destinations). And next year, who knows?

We also recognize that many of these restaurants are out of most people’s price range, which is why we also publish a ranking of America's 101 Best Casual Restaurants, accommodating the pizzerias and taquerías and burger joints and fried chicken shacks and such that aren’t included here, but that we all love (and sometimes, frankly, prefer to the more serious places ranked here).

The sheer quality and diversity demonstrate that we live in a truly exciting time for food in the United States. We’re pleased to unveil our 2019 list of America’s best restaurants.