Top 100 Best NYC Restaurants 2024 | Vanguard Restaurant Projects in NYTimes
April 02, 2024
For the second year in a row, renowned NYTimes food critic Pete Wells dropped his Top 100 Best Restaurants in NYC list for 2024.
“New York is a big city, and I tried to find 100 restaurants that represent its neighborhoods, its people and the rewards it has in store for hungry, curious eaters. The list is a tour. If you take it, you’ll see all five boroughs and a wide array of cooking and serving styles,” writes Wells. “Not many people will eat at all of them. But if you read about them, I hope you will start to see New York the way I see it whenever I look at my options and ask myself where I am going to eat next.”
We were thrilled to find a few of Vanguard’s projects that made the list, some for the first time with some returning champions from last year. Congratulations to all of the restaurants that made the list!
#35 – Daniel
“The kitchen at Daniel looks far and wide, and won’t think twice about weaving ingredients like Sea Island peas, Minnesota wild rice and burrata into the menu. Still, the cuisine of France remains the through line of almost every meal you might have in the grand colonnaded dining room. Of his generation of French chefs in the United States, none illuminates the flavors of his home country more faithfully than Daniel Boulud.”
“It’s hard to know what to make of a restaurant that gets rid of its single best feature, as Lodi did by closing the bakery that produced destination-quality breads and a flauto al cioccolato so precisely made that its lamination might have been designed by an architect. True, Lodi gained a few tables. Now it is easier to stroll in for elegant cafe dishes like bison tartare and chestnut gnocchi. And yes, drinking a spritz or a sbagliato while sitting on or looking out at Rockefeller Plaza produces a distinctly pleasurable shiver of the kind that only the world’s great cities can provide.”
“Anybody who believes a restaurant needs to tell a simple, easily understood story clearly hasn’t been to Mark’s Off Madison. The only concept plausibly tying together the Italian American favorites and Jewish classics and diner staples on Mark Strausman’s menu is that Mr. Strausman knows a good recipe for all of them. You can eat matzo ball soup, or a tuna melt, or a block of lasagna. You can’t eat a story.”