Top 25 Bi-Coastal Restaurant Rankings: The criteria
What matters most?
I’m taking on the unwieldy task of ranking my 25 favorite restaurants across Los Angeles and New York. The goal here is to capture the essence of Bangers & Jams in one place. Recommendations, wild judgments, subjective taste, coastal elitism — all in a post that inspires texts people are too afraid to include in the comments. I’ll publish my first round of top 25 rankings next Saturday behind the paywall, update it quarterly, and start recruiting some friends to do their own lists over here as well. It should be fun, besides the next seven days when I struggle over what gets cut (Found Oyster?) and what ends up at No. 1 (I swear it won’t be Bridges).
Starting to put together this list has made me think more deeply about what I value in a restaurant in these two cities where I spend the most time. LA was already a little sleepy before the fires, but lately I’ve felt a resurgence in energy across dining rooms. New York remains in an unnerving state of peak reservations. The dichotomy makes this kind of cross-city ranking fun.
The long list for consideration here reached about 150 restaurants. Inspired by my guy Zach Lowe, I’m making up a few sub-categories to create the final 25 rankings, based on a weighted 100-point scale. The categories reflect how I think about what makes a great dining destination that I’m compelled to recommend. It’s not a thing I ever consider in the moment, but it’s a useful reflective guide. Here they are:
The vibe (40 points): How you feel inside of the space, the service, the music, the decor, the crowd, the originality or the nostalgia — everything that makes a restaurant singular and transporting rather than a cafeteria. When I remember my favorite meals ever, this is what I think of.
The food (35 points): Important! But as I’ve written before, it’s okay to like restaurants more than food. It’s become a bit of a tenet of this blog over time.
The repeatability (15 points): I’m just simply not eating at Yoshino more than once every two years, no matter how good the food is. A place that facilitates weekly returns gets a bonus.
The vision (10 points): I have a longstanding approach of judging films based not on how good or bad they are but how successfully they accomplish the thing they set out to do. I have more respect for Challengers being a near perfect execution of hot people getting up to shit than I do for All We Imagine As Light stumbling over its grand ambitions. I feel somewhat the same way about restaurants. Palace Diner gets credit for doing the diner thing better than anyone else in the country. Your execution of a vision matters to me, even if that mission is nonsensical and weird. This could also be renamed the “Tom Colicchio just make me a good burger” category.
This is sure to cause some disagreement, so hop in the comments or DMs to tell me what I got wrong. See you next week for the full list.
trying to be patient here Austin
This breakdown is such a perfect distillation of what makes Bangers & Jams special — the unapologetic subjectivity, the acknowledgment that “vibe” does sometimes matter more than food, and the nod to how a restaurant can succeed just by being itself really well. The 100-point scale is fun precisely because it leans into the madness of trying to quantify something so personal.
Also love that “repeatability” made the cut. There’s something sacred about a place you want to go back to weekly, not just once for the clout. Can’t wait to see which spots make the list (and yes, I’m already irrationally angry about what I assume you’ll leave off).