Lists can be helpful as a good starting point, no doubt. As I said, pick nearly any one of these and you have a fairly good chance of having at least a pretty good meal for that type of cuisine, all things considered. It’s for this reason that I said this list would be more appropriately named “20 Highly Regarded LA Restaurants to Try.” Like an Eater list, it can be a helpful (even if not comprehensive or necessarily accurate) starting point to help you wade through the morass of options with some likely semi-competent assistance before settling into your own personal favorites of places that suit your taste.
But once one declares the list to be a ranking of the best restaurants across a broad array of different types of cuisine and echelons (not grouped by category but pitted against one another) then it becomes extremely difficult to justify.
Granted, we can tell that n/naka is a better restaurant than Hometown Buffet, even if they’re different. N/naka’s relative success in its ambitions for the type of cuisine, unique viewpoint for the area (dedicated solely to modern kaiseki), quality and deliciousness, ambiance, factor of excitement, etc. are some of the ways we can ostensibly know that n/naka is indeed a better restaurant than Hometown Buffet. It’s very obvious. Even despite price and one’s perception of value (fwiw, n/naka is not a bad relative value, all things considered, if one is willing to spend that amount on a meal). But how do we justify AOC being 5 places better than n/naka? Is it because Goin is more prolific in the industry? Is it because Mediterranean inflected Californian cuisine is somehow more deserving, delicious, innovative, or has a broader appeal than modern kaiseki? Moreover, how do we justify that Q deserves to be LA’s 7th best restaurant when Mori is not in the top-20? “Best” is exclusive by definition, and any restaurant omitted from this list is deemed not as good as those that made the cut. My question is, “how did they arrive at those conclusions (how did they weigh all the myriad criteria?)” and furthermore, “was their analysis well-informed?”. It would be extremely difficult to justify enumerating how much better one restaurant is than another if both restaurants are very successful at their own cuisines and all the intangibles.
I’m not calling for the immediate extinction or all lists altogether; rather, I’m annoyed by the frequent production of lists claiming to enumerate the “Bests” when 1) they’re sampling from so many different types or restaurants with different aims, and 2) they fail to explain how they could so authoritatively arrive at the conclusion that a place like AOC is exactly 5 spots higher than a place like n/naka. With that said, the amount or critical analysis necessary to justify such an undertaking is entirely impractical. This list quickly becomes a fairly random and unprincipled enumeration of the author’s favorites.