3 Bay Area Eateries Make New York Times List Of Best U.S. Restaurants

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The New York Times released its annual list of America's Best Restaurants this week and three of the 50 restaurants are right here in the Bay Area. The chosen spots are Abacá and San Ho Won in San Francisco, and Little Saint in Healdsburg.

The writers called the food at all of the winners amazing.

All three of the Bay Area restaurants opened last year or this year. According to the Times, "While we love to see a dynamic new dining room open its doors, we’re equally impressed by kitchens that are doing their best work years in. So while some of our picks debuted just this summer, others have been around for decades. The one thing they do have in common: The food is amazing."

Here's what the reviewers had to say about each of the local restaurants —

Abacá

In a soaring, sunlit dining room framed with hanging plants, Francis and Dian Ang and the team behind the Filipino pop-up Pinoy Heritage make every dinner feel like a party, complete with pancit and lumpia, habit-forming barbecue sticks of beef tongue and homemade longanisa, and a series of platitos that change in step with Northern California’s seasonal seafood and produce.

Little Saint

It may seem like a cheat to open a plant-based restaurant in the Sonoma Valley’s cradle of organic abundance. But it would almost be a shame not to open one, if you had not only a 24-acre farm nearby but also the cooking brain trust of Single Thread, Little Saint’s sibling restaurant with three Michelin stars. The food here, like the space, is bright and inviting. Chilled strawberry borscht levels up with a spike of curry and coconut yogurt. The smashed cucumbers with XO sauce and crispy rice lightly scorch and then refresh. And the crust on a chocolate tart will make you wonder why anyone uses anything but coconut cream as shortening.

San Ho Won

A hulking charcoal grill is at the heart of Jeong-In Hwang and Corey Lee’s Korean barbecue restaurant, which turns out dark, glossy pieces of thickly cut galbi, beef tongue and fatty rib-eye cap that are gently smoky and impossibly juicy. Unlike many Korean barbecue restaurants, it’s not a communal cooking experience, but that means you can relax and leave the grilling to the restaurant’s virtuosic cooks.

Los Angeles also had three restaurants on the list — Anajak Thai, Here’s Looking at You, and Kato.

View the entire list on The New York Times.

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