The 10 best dishes I ate in 2024 🍽️

Perfect plates in New York, LA & more.

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Le Veau d’Or’s frogs’ legs must be pretty damn good. They’re mentioned in The New York Times’ Top New York Dishes of 2024 and in The New Yorker’s Best Restaurant Dishes of 2024. I guess The Infatuation liked the restaurant’s duck magret aux cerises more, because that’s what made it onto their 25 Best New Dishes Of 2024. This was also the case with Sawa, which is on that Infatuation list, the New Yorker’s, and on Eater’s Favorite New York Dishes of 2024, but for three different dishes. Same with Cafe Mado, except with NYT instead of Eater. Strange Delight, too, made it onto the New Yorker’s list and the Infatuation’s for a swordfish belly dish and fried shrimp sandwich, respectively. Eater preferred its seafood tower. You get the point.

If you skimmed through any of those lists, you probably also noticed this overlap. Maybe it just means those dishes are really, really fabulous. I’m sure the masa pancake at Cocina Consuelo that dominated them rocks! It might also mean everyone could stand to eat at some restaurants that have never made it onto Resy’s hit list. I still think they’re all fun reads — I like seeing what food really stuck with people and why. But I especially like when I read about a place I’ve never heard of, or a dish I’ve never ordered somewhere I’ve been to a bunch of times. That’s why I enjoyed reading Lorenzo’s direct but fun-to-read awards on

Mr. Flood's Party

and scrolling Austin’s lengthy, multi-city list on

Bangers & Jams

. I cracked up reading

Feed Me

’s semi-anonymous restaurant critic’s buy/sell list and appreciated his pick for the best wine in New York City. These touched on all of the dishes, new or old, that they couldn’t stop thinking about. And they weren’t all at the same five places.

Below is a similar type of list. These are the 10 dishes that I thought were so special and so delicious that I still remember tiny details about them months later. Some are new, some were new to me. Five are in New York City, two are in Los Angeles, one is a real wild card. One is across the pond and another is in Italy. I hope you have fun reading it, that you try something on it, that it puts something on your radar you didn’t know existed. I’d call even just one of those three a success. Talk to you in 2025.