Top Food Critics Say These Are The 20 Best Restaurants In America

Francesco Tonelli for Chronicle BooksThe dining room at Jean-Georges in New York CityMost lists of top restaurants are crowd-sourced from diner reviews or compiled by anonymous editors. Samir Arora, a former Apple employee and the founder of Glam Media, decided to go a different route with his new global restaurant guide: "Foodie Top 100 Restaurants Worldwide."

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He asked a handful of notable food critics, including former New York Times food writer Patricia Wells, former New York Magazine food critic Gael Greene, former Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, and top critics from France, Japan, and India to share their picks for the world's best restaurants.

The guide focuses foremost on food, looking at factors like service and decor as complementary. As Arora writes in the introduction, "The food must be spectacular; everything else is secondary."

France and Japan are the big winners in the Foodie guide, each with 29 restaurants selected by the critics and Foodie's editors. We're taking a closer look at the 20 U.S. restaurants picked by critics (presented here in alphabetical order); the full list is available on Glam Media's website. Click here to buy the guide.