13 top dishes I ate in 2024 – a highly personal list of my best bites of the year.
2024 had its moments. I visited Mexico and Boston, Montana and Scottsdale. I dug further into California communities, including Santa Barbara, Oxnard, Santa Cruz and Mendocino. And I have the good fortune to live in the San Francisco Bay Area where I ate my way through San Francisco, the North Bay (Marin, Sonoma, Napa), Oakland and beyond.
Finding great food, dishes you want to return to a restaurant for, just so you can eat it again, is one of the pleasures of my work. Despite inflation and other economic pressures on restaurants and their diners, dishes that define a chef or restaurant are available in force. These are just some of my favorites. Please share some of your favorites, too!
Sea Urchin in Santa Barbara
Is there anything that quite compares to eating fresh sea urchin, right out of the, ummmm…shell? On a January trip to Santa Barbara, we stopped for fresh sea urchin at the Santa Barbara Fish Market in Goleta. Served with finger lime and lemon, the urchin was still wiggling when my server brought it to my table. All I needed was a tiny spoon to scoop out the gonads for maximum deliciousness. Unforgettable yummmmmmm.
An Unforgettable Oxheart
A nine-course meal at PRESS in the Napa Valley town of Saint Helena was packed full of creativity from chef Philip Tessier. Tessier’s coal-roasted Oxheart carrot makes regular appearances on his menus, likely because it is a show-stopper, inviting guests to rethink not only a carrot’s flavor but its size and texture.
The plump Oxheart, which can grow to be a pound in heft, was treated to a seasoning of XO sauce which seeped into the flesh via a series of Hasselbeck cuts. Stefan, my husband and frequent plus-one at my dining experiences, said: “I wouldn’t need to eat any more beef if I could just eat this instead.” It was an eye-opening dish of what a vegetable can accomplish in a talented chef’s hands.
A Salad By Any Other Name
Did you know chef Bruno Chemel, formerly of 2-Michelin Baumé, is cooking in San Francisco? In the former Gaspare space off of Union Square, he’s opened a charmer of a classic bistro, Le Parc Bistro & Bar. After a meeting with our tax attorney, we popped in for a light lunch. One order of chef’s “little lettuces” wouldn’t do – the combination of fresh lettuces herbs and dressing was beguiling. We ordered another. So simple. So good. Who says exceptional food has to be fussy or expensive?
A Smashing Soup
At a pop-up dinner at the CIA at Copia celebrating Women’s History Month in February, I had the good fortune to try chef Jennifer Jasinski’s cauliflower velouté. Impossibly creamy and dressed for a party with lobster and pickled kumquat, the soup equaled more than the sum of its parts. It’s not often that a cauliflower dish achieves the peak of culinary excellence, but Jasinski’s soup left me wondering why no one else seems to understand cauliflower’s true character like she does.
Glammed Up Tuna Tostada
During an April trip to Mexico, I had the good fortune to have dinner at Zihuatanejo’s Angustina Mezcal and Cocina. Run by brothers Antonio and chef Felipe Meneses, the mezcal bar and restaurant is open to the street, colorful and inviting. At its heart is the cooking of Guerrero, the region in which Zihua lies and Chef Meneses pours his passion for local ingredients into every dish. The dish that convinces me of Zihuantanejo’s place in Mexico’s culinary stars was a humble tostada de atún, a dish I found on every menu I saw during my trip.
Chef’s version included plátano mole, fermented chiles and a touch of vanilla, adding a distinct sweetness from the native plant’s aromatic beans. When paired with one of the house mezcals, the dish became something else, a testament to regional flavors working in harmony to create something that can be experienced only in the place where it is from. Stunning.
Artistic Yuba Inspired by an Artist
San Francisco’s Proper Hotel sports a stunning private dining room where anyone can reserve a salon experience, i.e., a multi-course tasting experience from chef Jason Fox. I was bowled over by a dish called The Melt, a piece inspired by a painting from Nepalese artist, Tsherin Sherpa, on view at the Asian Art Museum. Please read the description of the artist’s inspiration, then go to Gilda to taste the yuba, coconut milk, beet and turmeric interpretation. It’s playful, high-spirited, and thoughtful reworking of one artist’s work by another artist.
Vegan Dessert for the Win
Not many desserts make it onto my “best bites” list – I don’t have enough of a sweet tooth and my no gluten, no dairy restrictions don’t help. Chef Ryan Seal at Greenwood Restaurant at Sacred Rock Resort in Mendocino thrilled me with a chai tea coconut milk panna cotta. Dusted with Chinese 5-spice and topped with honey-lemon tea sorbet, the three-way tea flavor was somehow explosive and subtle, a feat of flavor I seldom experience in dessert. Complex dessert flavor? That’ll get you on my list.
Secret Sushi, Revealed
With only 12 seats available per night, the sushi experience at The Bungalow Kitchen in Tiburon from chef Yukinori Yama is one of those “hidden gems” that I wish more people knew about. Each dish in the 7-course sequence was a testament to chef Yama’s exacting technique, an education in the effort required to bring beautiful seafood to the table. Chef Yama’s yaki-sakana had me questioning why I never liked seafood with mushrooms but I fell hardest for the black sea perch, conger eel and chu-toro, three in a sequence of seven nigiri. Now this is nigiri.
Montana Mushroom
Little did I know that the tiny town of Big Fork, Montana (population 5,000) could serve up excellent eats. Skip the other places along the lake and head to Bonfire for chef Lisa Cloutier’s exceptional eats. A dish called “mushrooms” was crispy-fried maitakes. Simple enough. Tossed with charred spring onion and sugar snap peas, the dish tasted of spring’s freshness and fall’s depths. I found that contrast of flavors and textures in each dish, a feast for the senses so powerful, we ate there twice during our three-day summer stay.
Seasonal Foie Gras?
Accolades are regularly heaped on Boston chef Ken Oringer who, at his tapas restaurant, Toro, leans into Spanish flavor. A special the September evening I visited, foie gras was two fat lobes, seared and precisely salted before placed atop a grilled peach. Seasoned with little more than flaky salt and basil, the dish was a crash course in coaxing flavor from quick-sear technique and the sweetness of seasonal fruit. Mic drop.
A Witchy Apple
Insane creativity in the seasonal, 11-course menu from chef Dennis Efthymiou at Luce at San Francisco’s Intercontinental Hotel. This burnished apple looked, at first like a candle. After about a minute alight, our server removed the wick, the heat transforming the butter from form to spreadable. The taste? A hint of apple amidst the buttery goodness. Each dish was more creative than the next. We ate it all!
Do I Like Okra Now?
I had never tasted kurkuri bhindi, a north Indian snack of crispy okra, before I ordered it at Manhattan’s Junoon. Julienned, then coated with rice flour before a hot bath in the fryer, the dish took on added complexity from tomato, onion and two chutneys. It is the ugliest dish on my list (brown foods never look appealing in pictures), but who cares? If a New York restaurant can make okra taste this good, I’m willing to sacrifice the social media post.
A Steak For Chefs and Real People
On San Francisco’s Embarcadero, not far from the Ferry Building, Bon Delire is a sweet French bistro with hip hop vibes. Steak Frites with pepper sauce hit the top of my list for its perfectly executed medium-rare. They got the texture, color and temperature just so. I was impressed. It’s an easy-to-execute dish yet few cook it just right. For demonstrating exceptional technique, this steak, made it onto my list.
