My top 10 meals of 2024
26 cities, 274 restaurants, 92 tasting menus, 30 stars: here's the 10 restaurants that moved me the most.
Every year, I eat across the country—and this year, even with a trip to California canceled due to influenza B and my birthday trip to the south scrapped, I went to some of the best restaurants in this country (though I didn’t hit my goals of 300 restaurants across 30 cities).
Straight out the gate a trip from DC to Philadelphia to NYC took me, over the course of 11 days, to 17 tasting menus and 42 restaurants total. Three trips to Chicago took me to 19 more—and sent me from doubting Chicago’s food scene to falling in love with it.
From small town diners to restaurants on the Punjabi American highway to surprise bangers in Fargo to bagging all the stars in Denver/Boulder to catching and tracking trend Michelin starred cornbread, I ate my way through some of this country’s best restaurants. Some held up under the light—and some, well, as always, some didn’t.
People eat for different reasons. What I eat for is food that moves me to tears, food that makes me feel something. I’m not looking for perfect. I’m looking for creative and wild and daring.
As a woman who travels to eat, I’m looking for I’ve never had that before. And I’m looking for the restaurants I want to send you to, since the state of (most) American food writing is recommending almost every new restaurant as innovative to the point that we don’t really know what’s busting through the barriers anymore.
In a world of carbon copies, it feels rare in 2024, but not impossible, to find. You just have to know where to look. It requires journey after journey after journey, a honed palate, and knowledge of the national food scene enough to call out a stolen dish that local critics are calling innovative, that I know is just its first appearance here.
But I did find it. After eating a lot of very expensive, very bad food, here’s my best of 2024.
Honorable mention: Demi
As Chef Alan Hlebean found his footing at Demi over the past year, my meals at Demi came on and off my top 10 list, all of them beautiful. This specific best is from the summer 2024 menu which boasted a tomato granita salad that made me gasp, featured a corn and caviar dish that was my best version of that dish in 2024 (it appeared seemingly everywhere at all once), and had my favorite entrance into corn dessert (another trend that we can retire now, y’all, especially the corn molds). Top to bottom, broth to dessert, this meal was a stunner that landed as my number 11 closely followed at meal 12 with a meal at Demi in Winter 2024 that revolved around the orange. Demi holds spot 11 and spot 12 on my top 20 best meal list, the only restaurant to hold two spots.
Demi’s chefs are my personal choice for ringing in New Years Eve in the Twin Cities.
I’ll be back to backing (bang-banging) Chef Mason McDaniel in his new role (former sous at Demi during my favorite meals, now chef de cuisine at Spoon and Stable, both of which are Chef Gavin Kaysen’s restaurants) and the crew at Demi for a double feature, saving my mignonettes, as always, for the man I’m dating when he gets off work.
10. Myriel, St. Paul
It should come as no surprise to anyone who follows me that Myriel is my favorite restaurant in the Twin Cities—it’s where I spent what was supposed to be my wedding night, where I go to bring friends with broken hearts, where I go after a meal that disappointed for dessert, and it’s where I’ll spend my birthday this year (at the bar, of course). But there’s one singular meal that lands Myriel on this list: one where I ate dairy cow meatballs. After 17 years of life, Myriel received the meat of a beloved farmer’s cow to use in the restaurant, an honor that the farm did not take lightly, asking who might be the best fit for the task of honoring her life. Of course, the choice was Chef Karyn Tomlinson’s Myriel.
Not only was that meal exceptionally beautiful, but it symbolizes to me what Myriel does best: building relationships with farmers that go far deeper than the average restaurant.
9. Pietramala, Philadelphia
When the second dish I had at Pietramala hit my counter seat, I felt that this restaurant was special. That dish? It was a salad. A salad. Have you ever had a salad and thought to yourself, that’s it? That’s the dish of my night? I hadn’t before—but it happened to me twice, both in this year. This was the first. A brilliant use of Bandit’s vegan cheese in a dressing, greens that tasted better than any I’ve ever had. I think about this salad all of the time. It was followed by creamy pasta dish with no fake cheese aftertaste (that’s a rule at Pietramala, no substitutes) and a cabbage dish that I kept pulling up photos of throughout the year to compare to others as my benchmark for damn good cabbage. Sorbet by Chef Jeremy Hrycko rocked my mind, leaving him tied for my favorite pastry chef in the country alongside another chef on this list (dear Inquirer staff, some of us like intensely vegetal desserts).
Pietramala is the only vegan restaurant in the country I send everyone to—vegan or not, begging non-vegan friends who make a stop to go. And… I have hunch that’s sending me on a wild goose chase eating at vegan restaurants in 2025: that I think Pietramala is the best vegan fine dining restaurant in the country, not just now, but of all time.
8. Albi, DC
I was supposed to go somewhere else instead of Albi, but chefs kept trying to send me there instead of where I had planned to go. I ended up cancelling a reservation at the restaurant I was supposed to go to and doing something I rarely do: trust a group of chefs on where to eat (chefs normally send you to their buddy’s spots and don’t have weekends off, so they actually eat out far less than you). Albi has the best pita I have ever had with one lone wolf working that station covered in sweat. Their truffle hummus that I thought was a gimmick at first, wasn’t. The restaurant boasts the best knafeh I’ve ever eaten—and I’ve eaten it from Middle Eastern grandmothers. The service is flawless and unintrusive. I timed it. From dish finished to plate cleared, from straw unwrapped to straw wrapper taken, they were always there in under 90 seconds.
Albi was so good, it moved me to tears, leaving me sitting at my table looking out over the restaurant and restoring my faith in east coast fine dining at a point when it was waning.
7. Houndstooth, MPLS
My meal at the California Street Farm x Houndstooth dinner was nothing short of hit after hit. A cheese course that wouldn’t be out of place in a Michelin starred restaurant. A szechuan cider I still think about. And… new friends. Four of my dining companions from the Houndstooth dinner have been to my house, for my own (free, non professional) pop up dinners. It featured my second favorite tomato dish of 2024, a giant salad that left us all wanting to lick the plate. But it also represented my favorite kind of food: hyper seasonal, local, well paired.
Chef Rick Didora and beverage director Paige Latham Didora are both best in class—and if you’re getting married, they should be who you call to cater.
6. Beckon, Denver
Beckon has two of my favorite chefs in the country working at it. The first is Chef Peter Briggs, beverage genius who moved me to tears not once or twice but three times with his beverage pairings. The second is Chef Hunter Miller on pastry, who is tied for my favorite pastry chef in the country. He delivered my favorite dessert of 2024: an actual carrot with sea buckthorn ice cream, among other things. Currently, the dessert is antelope bone ice cream and candy cap mushrooms, one that I’m genuinely sad I will miss out on, as I won’t return to Beckon until summer 2025. My three meals in fall 2024 blew me away from service to hospitality to beverage to savory to dessert.
Beckon has landed on my very small must visit every year list and is far and away the best of the starred restaurants in the Boulder/Denver region, worthy—in my eyes—of more than its singular star.
5. Indienne, Chicago
When I went to Indienne, I was doubting Chicago’s food scene, finding most of the “best” restaurants I went to stodgy, stuffy, and downright boring. I left most of them starving. But a chef friend begged me to go to Indienne with him, asking me to let him change my mind. I went—and I was so moved that two dishes in (you guessed it), I cried. A black dairy dal so stunning I don’t have a close second to compare it to, paneer dishes that seem to break the mold of what paneer can do, and my favorite first bites of 2024 which blend Chicago’s history of molecular gastronomy with Indian flavors.
Indienne is where I send most people for a singular Chicago dinner, sending eight people there in 2024. Approachable, delicious, relatively affordable, and best in its class, all of them left deeply moved, too.
4. Duck Sel, Chicago
Before I had to cancel my trip due to circumstances outside of my control, I was supposed to go back to Duck Sel before the new year for my birthday—which is probably the biggest compliment I can give you. I can go anywhere for my birthday. I chose here. I chose Duck Sel because it is a party. The N/A drinks are fun (you can actually taste the cereal in their cereal milk), the bathroom is a riot, and the food is executed at a level most chefs can’t achieve in a commercial kitchen. The catch? Duck Sel isn’t in a commercial kitchen, it’s a two bedroom apartment where one bedroom is full of fridges.
Deeply playful, centering my favorite protein (duck), and centering my favorite thing in the world (a good dinner party) if you have one night to ball out in Chicago and want it to be fun, this is where I’m sending you.
3. Mint Mark, Madison
Mint Mark is my favorite restaurant in the country, holding onto that title after they moved. Brunch is saucy, spicy, sweet, and sticky. Dinner includes dishes pulled out very old cookbooks (like a Depression era sauerkraut cake). They have my favorite biscuit in the north. And they have best integration between front of house and back of house during service that I’ve seen all year. Mint Mark is excellent, with Chefs Sean Pharr and Kasey Cooke spinning up dishes like wings and waffles, savory donuts, and dishes inspired by nostalgia. Mint Mark doesn’t take itself too seriously when it comes to dishes, but hanging behind the pass written is Scrabble letters is Good Enough Isn’t.
You can feel that when you’re there—that they’re pushing for their version of the best they’ve got.
2. Ilis, Brooklyn
Ilis deserves a star—and I’ll stand on that. While most people expect me to say my favorite dish there was the caviar sweet potato, it wasn’t. It was a cauliflower drenched in a sauce made up mostly of butter and topped with herbs, truffle, and flowers. My meal also included Brussels sprouts presented on the stalk like ribs and funky granita and dessert that reminds its head chef of home. To be in there felt a little bit like magic, with everything running smoothly and the kitchen team a joy to experience.
Ilis was an experience that left me speechless, with everything from the music to the hospitality to the food feeling dialed all the way in.
1. Esmé, Chicago
I think the staff at Esmé must think I’m an extremely emotive eater, because every dish they set down left me with some kind of reaction. The truth is, another restaurant on this list (Pietramala) thought I hated their food because I am normally so straight faced. I just couldn’t help it. I gasped at a watermelon cut in half, with half of it replaced with a tomato gel. I cried when I was presented a panna cotta shaped into a sunflower, made by a very young pastry chef. And more than once, I audibly responded to a drink set in front of me. At the bar (which is an extremely affordable tasting menu, clocking in at $68) and in the restaurant, Esmé was my favorite meal of 2024. Deeply moving, incredibly poignant, it’s a restaurant that I send chefs to when they’re looking for inspiration. Chefs Jenner Tomaska and Gustavo Mejia handle the stories of the artists that inspire them with care—but they also handle you with care.
Esmé wasn’t just my best meal of 2024, it was my best meal of all time.
That’s a wrap for 2024, but I’ll release my top dishes of 2024 in the first week of January.
I’m quietly working on four long-term projects, tracking four restaurants over the course of 6-12 months, and I already have my travel built for 2025. From Philadelphia to Portland from San Francisco to New York from Michelin starbecue in Texas to tracking the birth place of English-Indian dishes in the UK, I’ll see you soon.