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| Top 100 Bay Area
Restaurants Michael Bauer |
Sunday, April 13, 2003
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One litmus test for a truly great restaurant town is seeing how it weathers rough times. For a while, in the late 1980s, Los Angeles was the epicenter for national trends. However, when the crash hit in the mid-'90s, the trendy dining scene there withered, and it has yet to regain its former prominence. In the Bay Area, it's a different story. Even in lean times, we remain a national trendsetter. The economy has been on the skids for more than two years, but 2002 was one of the best years ever for new restaurants. Although the most notable new restaurants weren't necessarily the big and flashy dot-com havens of recent years, they still broke new ground. Roxanne's brought raw food to the forefront; Limon showed the best side of Peruvian cuisine; La Table gave us stylish, white-tablecloth food at moderate prices. We also continue to build on our love affair with small-plate menus. In this year's Top 100 restaurants, you'll find Asian, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish restaurants focusing on small bites. In addition, several old-guard places, such as Moose's, have earned spots on the list after reinventing themselves with new menus that break out of the traditional genre. About 20 of this year's Top 100 are new to the list, a number that's typical of most years. A few of last year's crop aren't included because they've closed -- such as Gordon's House of Fine Eats -- but in other cases, I simply had some hard choices to make. It seems that each year the bar keeps getting higher, and some perfectly good restaurants fall from the list, edged out by newer places. That said, you'll still find a wide variety of cuisines and price ranges, from the humble La Taqueria to the haute French Laundry. It would be naive to imply that the situation is rosy for restaurants, because most places are suffering from a lack of tourists and business travelers. Residents, too, are spending less and restaurants have had to adapt, with bargain fixed-price menus and lower prices. Still, the fact that the trends keep coming says a lot for the talent here. It also says something about local diners. Once again, the Bay Area proves that when times get tough, we eat.
The restaurants: A-C D-H I-M N-Z |
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