San Francisco

Burdell chef-owner Geoff Davis. Photo by Adahlia Cole, courtesy of Burdell

Best of The Hit ListSan FranciscoOakland

The 10 Restaurants That Defined Bay Area Dining This Year

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We asked our contributors to the Resy Hit List to share their top dining experiences in their cities this year — 10 restaurants that are helping to define the state of great dining right now. Please welcome back our Best of The Hit List for 2023. (You can find other cities’ top picks here.)

And just like that, we’ve made it to the end of 2023. Time flies when you’re eating well.  The Bay Area’s diverse and delicious restaurant scene makes dining out a joy, and this year has especially shown us that restaurants can be very personal places for the chefs behind them, providing a space to share their unique stories, backgrounds, and worldviews through their dishes and menus.

Geoff Davis, for example, causes us to question everything we think we know about what constitutes California cuisine with his nostalgic soul food restaurant Burdell, while Anthony Salguero is making Salvadoran fare with flare at Popoca, applying his fine-dining background and ingredient-driven ethos to the food he grew up with.

At the same time, solid standbys like Rintaro continue to impress, evolve, and innovate. These are 10 restaurants that provided the most memorable meals of 2023, and helped define how we dine right now, in this special year-end edition of the Hit List.