Full category scores: Top 25 restaurant rankings

How each finalist ranked in vibe, food, repeatability and vision

I published a (somewhat controversial) Top 25 Bicoastal Restaurant Rankings on Saturday, highlighting my favorite spots right now in New York & LA. It was fun and brutal to make. A worthwhile exercise.

It’s a deeply personal list, which is why The Odeon and Luv2Eat Thai ranked so highly and Dunsmoor did not. I started off with a list of about 150 eligible restaurants. To recap the eligibility requirements:

• I only included places where you can sit down and order dinner at a table. No QR codes, no counters, trucks or stalls.

• They had to reasonably be regarded as located in Los Angeles or New York, the two cities covered most closely over here.

• They had to deliver across four categories. Those were vibe (40 points for the space, the service, the music, the decor, the crowd), food (35 points), repeatability (15 points for demanding regular return visits), vision (10 points for execution of a clear POV).

I whittled down the list of 150 to 29 restaurants I recommend, visit and think about the most. The scoring system helped me click everything into place from there. For the final part of this little content trilogy, here are the full category scores and rankings for the 29 finalists. You should be able to sort and search them and everything if you’re viewing this outside of the Substack app.