My Top Ten Restaurant Dishes of 2023

The wedge salad at Found Oyster in L.A. puts all other wedge salads to shame.

Hey everyone,

As much as I love to cook, I also love going to eat (I’m my mother’s son) and this year has offered up two major excuses to dine at some of the top restaurants in the country. Excuse #1: we were leaving L.A., so we had to visit all of L.A.’s best spots before we left. Excuse #2: we were freshly arrived back to NY, so we had to visit all of the new places that everyone was talking about so we could keep up with the Kardashians (metaphorically speaking).

With Craig and his parents Steve and Julee at Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami.

Looking over my list, we did a very good job. And as much as we hit the Must Visit spots in both cities, most of my favorite bites were at the less popular places — neighborhood spots with a convivial atmosphere and unpretentious service. The kinds of place where they don’t ask if you want sparkling or still, they just put a bottle of tap water on the table.

So without further ado, here are my Top Ten Restaurant Dishes of 2023:

10. Negroni Jello Shots at Café Mars

One of my dreams about moving back to NY was to be able to read a review in the Tables for Two column in The New Yorker and then bop over to the restaurant to try it myself. And I did just that in August, when I read Helen Rosner’s entertaining review of Café Mars in Gowanus and then just bopped over there with our friends Mark and Diana.

Helen’s review highlights one of the more controversial bites from our evening: “These are ‘jell-olives’: gently saline Castelvetrano olives suspended in cubes of Negroni jello, like specimens in a murky jar. They are — this is an unreserved compliment — completely horrifying, an exercise in absurdism. The flavor is fantastic, bright and briny, but the firm flesh of the olive and the blobbily collapsing gelatin combine in the mouth to create a visceral texture that I loathed bodily and also immediately wanted to experience again.”

Yes to all of that. Some of the people at our table hated them, but I loved them. They felt very New York to me and made me glad we were here.

9. Stone Crabs at Joe’s Stone Crab

Bringing Dungeness crab aficionados from Washington State to eat stone crabs in Florida is a risky proposition, but that’s precisely what happened when we took Craig’s parents to Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, this Thanksgiving.

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And though they remain loyal to the Dungeness variety, Steve and Julee had a splendid time attacking this giant platter of stone crabs. The waiter gave us a demo on how to eat them and the combination of lime juice with mustard sauce made for a sublime bite. We also learned that stone crab fisherman just remove the claw and then throw the crab back into the water so that it gets to live and grow its arm back. Beat that, Washington State!

8. Braised Lamb with Celeriac Puree and Sugar Snap Peas at Chez Panisse

As part of our farewell to California, Craig and I trekked up the California coast to visit Sonoma County (our first time) and Carmel. On the way, we stopped in Berkeley to see our friend @j_ontheway and that night we had dinner at Chez Panisse.

I’d been to Chez Panisse only once before, downstairs in the restaurant with a set menu; this time, we ate upstairs in the café where everything was á la carte. The food was no less divine: we ate a beet salad that must’ve been prepared in the Garden of Eden, and the apple tart for dessert tasted like Eve made it herself. But the main course — braised lamb with celeriac puree and sugar snap peas — was just the perfect plate of food. For a restaurant that prides itself on seasonality (and that introduced the word to Americans’ vocabulary), this dish exemplified that entire philosophy: it was April. So spring lamb? Check. Winter-to-spring transitional vegetables? Check. Fried sprigs of rosemary as a transitional herb? Check. Very few plates of food deserve to be called “iconic,” but this one absolutely does.