North America
https://www.oadguides.com/lists/north-america/top-restaurants/2023
Isn’t Paul Chung cooking at Angler in LA now or did he just develop the menu?
How the fuck is Vespertine on this list when it hasn’t been open all year?
he developed the menu.
I’ve never heard of OAD before. Whatever their methodology it seems like the result is similar to a lazy compilation of the usual suspects by a clickbait site.
Opinionated About Dining (OAD) is Steve Plotnicki’s thing. I tend to think of it as his version of “50Best” lists.
I saw that “About” page, doesn’t really tell me anything.
I’ve never heard of Steve Plotnicki before, either.
If that (somewhat illiterate) article describes his algorithm correctly, it has a feedback loop. People who eat at higher-rated restaurants have their opinions weighted more highly so the restaurants they review get higher ratings.
One big virtue of that list is that it doesn’t seem to have an arbitrary cap. After the 150 top-ranked places it has another 138 “highly recommended” and 250 “recommended.”
Park’s BBQ at 67 and San Ho Won 80, ha ha ha ha. Not that Park’s isn’t great but seriously.
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As far as lists go, OAD is better than most. Their reviewers comprise people who generally are rather knowledgable about food and eat out regularly. Some of the top reviewers at OAD seem way more informed than say, Michelin or World’s 50 Best sponsored kind of reviewers, if I had to guess.
With that said, I believe these kinds of lists are always fatally flawed. Not enough reviewers can visit all of these sufficiently to rank them in hierarchy (as if ranking different types of restaurants could be done with that much accuracy, anyway), and it seems that a lot of these rankings depend on how “hot” a restaurant is within the community / how much momentum it has / how much history and how “due” a restaurant may be.