You’re not alone. Dining out at fancy restaurants is one of my few indulgences. I’ve been really fortunate to eat quite a few of the highest rated ones and I’ve come the the conclusion there’s a few different categories:
- inventiveness & craft: these are chefs that are pushing the boundaries in terms of techniques, finding new ingredients, or trying to find new ways to turn a dish into essentially an art form. Noma, El Bulli, etc. would belong here. There’s every chance you will actually get a dish or two here that you don’t like. But that’s kinda ok, it’s about pushing boundaries and perspectives. Often the kind of places you’d be happy to only go to once.
- all about the flavour & execution: the kind of restaurant where everything is perfect and everything is delicious. Where you finish your meal, are stuffed, but would come back and order the exact same things again tomorrow if you had the chance because it was that good. Petrus in London was one of my all time faves in this category.
- about the experience: it’s not all about the food, this is more like a form of entertainment. You’ll also need to embrace one of the previous two categories to be successful though. The Fat Duck in the UK and Lazy Bear in SF fit this for me. Entertaining enough to do more than once, unlikely to ever become a regular haunt though.
- the rest: I’ve never understood. Expensive for the sake of being expensive. Popular because they’re popular. Probably latching on to some current food trend. The food is always quite good at these places. It’s just never obvious why it’s the best.
Spend enough time in any city and you can usually find amazing restaurants in each of these categories that aren’t anywhere near popular enough to make a Michelin list. I’ve also found if I’m asking a local for a recommendation that framing the question into one of the first 3 categories helps, e.g., “if you had to eat at only 1 restaurant in this city every week for the rest of the year, which restaurant would you want it to be?”