Define best however you want to. If you live some place like NYC, well, just post whatever you feel.
Here in Gainesville, Florida, I’d say the “best” is The Paramount Grill. I like to go here and order things I don’t really like, because this chef somehow always makes everything taste wonderful. Good service too. This is as close to fine dining as we’ve found in North Florida.
I also like Bahn Thai. I will be the first to admit it’s ancient and a little weird (maybe I should say “quaint”). It’s also very quiet, almost unnervingly so. But I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever eaten there, and the portions are so big I always take some home. They have a picture of Michael J. Fox and Woody Harrelson eating there, which must have been back when they were filming Doc Hollywood. Maybe MJF will come back someday.
Lacking fine dining establishments, I’ll offer up one of the local Thai places: Thai Chili. If the OP will allow “within 10 miles of home” to count as “in your city,” then it would have to be Citrone. Nice enough place, but not up to the standards the wife and I have come to enjoy by the better places in Vegas.
In DC, people seem to be giving that honor to CityZen, although I haven’t eaten there yet.
My favorite place in DC right now is probably Chez Billy, but mostly for its bar.
This is why I’m poor. Seriously. My credit is shit, my savings are nil’ and I live week to week. But I can’t imagine only going out to eat once every two or three years. I just…I just don’t have the discipline, but I admire your style, because all the people I know who are very well off and have a nice car and clean credit and a nice home all seem to think a lot more like you than they do like me.
Anyway, I don’t know what is considered the best restaurant in Rochester, NY, but I do know that my favorite is Tapas. They have a live band and a great atmosphere and the best pasta and seafood ever. I love it.
I live in a small town, and though there are restaurants I go to, in general, even a halfway-decent cook can outdo all of them. Around here, you don’t go out to eat to be wowed by the food; you go out because you don’t feel like cooking, you want to get out of the house, or you feel social. The food is uniformly OK, occasionally bad, and very, very occasionally worth the price.
Like Chefguy says about Portland, Boulder is such a foodie town that it’s hard to narrow it down.
But, overall, our favorite “date night” restaurant here is Pizzeria Basta. The roast half-chicken is the best chicken I’ve eaten in my life, bar none. Wood-fired pizzas and desserts are also wonderful. There are fancier and more expensive restaurants in Boulder, and there are places with better cocktail menus or nicer locations, but this is where I send people who love to eat.
Last time Emeril came to Austin, he had a choice of many, many swanky places to eat. He skipped town and chowed down at a nice place in our little town.
Two run-down dinery kind of places and a Dunkin’ Donuts. We have to go a full town over to get a McD’s and a Carl’s Jr.
We briefly had a very upscale restaurant that failed to attract an international following and serially honked off the locals who tried it. The owners had watched too many shows about obnoxious asshole chefs and failed to learn how to deliver an edible dinner.
A note: Cityzen is located in the Mandarin Oriental. The “Empress Lounge” bar in that hotel is also quite nice. It is not the best bar in DC - I can think of better cocktails, swankier digs, better music, etc. - but the Empress does a lot of things well, and has respectable jazz vocalists on Friday and Saturday nights. Drinks are pricey, but no more so than any other high-end cocktail bar, and it’s a pretty good date night place.
Small town. I can choose from McDonald’s, Subway, Arby’s, a Chinese buffet, and a pizza place or two. As other posters have said, you don’t go out to dine; you go out because you don’t want to cook. There are some nice, real restaurants about 45 miles away, though.
Sacramento and outlying areas have always been poor in decent, independent restaurants that survived. I lost count of excellent places that went under to to make room (or market share) for a Macaroni Grill, Outback, Olive Garden or even Morton’s. Seems like if they don’t have roots in the 1970s or earlier, they’re easily swept away by the flood tide of chain customers.
For such a small city, Cincinnati has quite a lot of really good fine dining places. Jean Robert’s Table, The Orchids at Palm Court, Boca, the Ruby steakhouses, Nicola’s, Cumin, etc etc.
