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"FacebookPinterestAustin's favorite food-truck chef traded his vintage trailer \nfor small plates and big crowds.\n\n10. The Restaurant That Grew Up in a Trailer\n\n The name itself is reason to be wary, combining as it does two movements as ubiquitous and smothering as melted cheese on enchiladas: craft beer and pork fetishism. And at first glance, Barley Swine looks like any number of places that have embraced some blend of small-plate aesthetics, farm-to-table piety, and neo-carnivore swagger. But the food proves just how mature these movements have become. Chef-owner Bryce Gilmore built his reputation out of a 1980 Fleetwood Mallard trailer stationed in a nearby park. He called it Odd Duck Farm to Trailer and served wildly popular pork-belly sliders. \n\nNow Gilmore is taking advantage of a proper kitchen. The chalkboard menu offers more advanced technique and a plating style that weirdly and pleasantly brings to mind the mid-1990s at, say, Aureole: all vertical piles and squeeze-bottle swooshes. A shimmery square of pork belly now comes topped with a chile-citrus foam and served beside spiced popcorn. Sweetbreads, grilled radicchio, and creamy bone-marrow risotto tumble together in a happy frolic of rich and sharp flavors\u2014further proof that trend fatigue is no match for smart, talented cooking. -Brett Martin\n\nFacebookPinterestTweezers put the finishing touch on cured salmon with greens from the rooftop garden.\n\n9. Small, Scrappy, and Satisfying as Hell\n\nIt's BYOB, because thanks to some municipal technicality, this place will never have a liquor license. And while chefs like Grant Achatz (See: Next) get blank checks to open their new restaurants, the Kims (brother, sister, girlfriend) had just enough money for this old, busted-up Italian-beef stand in Chicago's Ukrainian Village. They had no design funds, so they hired an artist who created a space of found parts\u2014vintage theater seats and church pews. They have no room for a walk-in cooler, so chef Edward Kim, who was recently at Per Se in New York, takes daily deliveries himself. But when you walk into the restaurant, when the first of many smiling faces says something like \"Enjoy your evening,\" you sense exactly none of this hardship. The thirty-two-seat room feels as if it's been carefully assembled over a lifetime. The menus are hand-embossed each day. And the food, like the rest of the place, is labored over. Time and energy take the place of overused, overpriced ingredients. Squid stuffed with sausage gets depth and heat from a chile paste imported from a farm in Tennessee. Cream of Wheat, enriched and amplified by lamb drippings and brown butter, is maybe the best thing I ate all year. But when a dish reaches near perfection\u2014like the wildly popular chicken and waffles\u2014it's cut from the menu and brought back on special occasions so the kitchen can defy the odds from scratch.-Mike Benoist\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nSt. Anselm, the lo-fi, locavore steak house\n\nI crave steak pretty often, but I never crave a steak house that feels like the preamble to a bad bachelor party. Brooklyn's St. Anselm is tiny and mostly wood, and the grill is right beside the bar. Watch them sear your flawless $15 butcher's steak while you drink wine from kegs\u2014fresh, flavorful whites and reds from New York wineries, served in scientific beakers instead of mouth-blown crystal. A bacon-laden iceberg wedge is $8; crispy panfried mashed potatoes go for $5, which, if you're lucky, will get you a tablespoon of b\u00E9arnaise at some glorified Las Vegas mall. -Stan Parish\n\nFacebookPinterestLocal diver scallops make the Jersey Shore look good.\n\n8. French Technique Moves to the Burbs\n\nMica is lodged in a small stone building along a cobblestone street of gingerbread houses and trolley tracks in Philly's Chestnut Hill neighborhood. It's a scene from a heartwarming children's storybook.\n\n Walk inside and the fairy tale ends. The fireplace is cold, and a draft crawls down the flue and up your legs. Wear long undies if you go on a chilly night. The tables are almost bare. The wine list isn't much.\n\n Back in the kitchen is Chip Roman, the chef. He does not come out to chat. He's creating complex dishes and doing it astoundingly well. Mica is about food.\n\n The menu has eight appetizers and four mains. There are prix fi menus, mandatory on weekends, and tasting menus nightly. When I asked if I might add a tasting menu item to my order, I was told no.\n\n Mica believes in tough love. And good cooking.\n\n We had Barnegat scallops with white chocolate sprinkled on top, enough to add a smidgen of sweetness, exquisitely done. We had Lancaster County chicken, rolled, fried, and stood upright. So much work. With it was bacon, pearl onions, fingerling potatoes, slashes of sour-cherry puree. Shows Roman's training, a stint at Le Bec-Fin.\n\n We had foie gras terrine, short ribs with celery-root puree, rockfish with sweet potatoes, black bass in brown butter. All came to the table lavished with accoutrements appropriate to the dish. Nothing showed up twice. Not a sauce. Not a drizzle.\n\n Roman reminded me of the young Parisian chefs cooking in stark surroundings, thinking about nothing but their stoves. Maybe he's better than they are, considering the lusciousness of his Manjari-chocolate dessert. Did I mention that he's Mica's pastry chef, too? -Alan Richman\n\nFacebookPinterestThe dining room only feels like it's been here forever.\n\n7. We'll Be at the Bar\n\n What's astonishing about the Woodsman is not so much that the kitchen doesn't miss\u2014it's that this place didn't exist until October of last year. It's the restaurant that, if you've never been to Portland, you imagine on every corner: reclaimed wood basking in the glow of Edison bulbs, kitschy Zig-Zag dispensers behind the bar, serious cocktails, serious coffee. But this isn't just some dutiful, farmy Portlandia-esque ideal, and after a few courses, you realize that the \"Tavern\" descriptor is typical northwestern understatement, like saying that it sometimes rains here. Start with American ham sliced to transparency and served with bread, butter, and pickled collard greens, which make for the best sandwich in a city with a cultish sandwich culture. Chef Jason Barwikowski steals smartly and shamelessly from around the globe, whether it's the perfect acqua pazza on the roasted trout or the smoky hint of Lapsang souchong in their signature riff on a Manhattan. The $4 Josper Tea Sandwich is crustless white bread stuffed with housemade coppa di testa, spicy mustard, and crisp arugula\u2014an English delivery system for Italian charcuterie, seared in the white-hot Josper oven, which is how the kitchen leaves its mark. All that for about the same price as a cup of Portland coffee. -Stan Parish\n\nMini-Empire of the Year, Ashley Christensen Restaurants\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nChristensen's first Raleigh restaurant, Poole's Diner, is the kind of place you plan a whole road trip around. Last year she added three new spots in her hometown for a portfolio that's one card shy of a royal flush. Chuck's is what you get when an ace chef devotes herself entirely to burgers. The Belgian fries are the size of bratwurst, and the root beer comes on tap. Beasley's Chicken + Honey will go down in history as the spot where Christensen perfected fried chicken and sides like pimento mac and cheese. Raleigh is a drinking town (it got the nod as North Carolina's capital because of its proximity to a popular tavern back in 1792), and Fox Liquor Bar is the craft-cocktail spot this place has been waiting for. The Kentucky Maid, a mint julep with lime juice and fresh cucumber, proves that there's no southern staple this woman can't improve. -Aaron Lake Smith\n\nFacebookPinterestFrom huge cuts of meat to spicy sea-bass ceviche, the Peruvian\n\n6. Peruvian is Here to Stay\n\n\"I will tell you how many influences Peruvian food has,\" says Ricardo Zarate, chef of the cramped, crowded, and wildly popular Picca. \"When I was a boy, we always celebrated Christmas with panettone. It wasn't until I went to Italy that I realized it wasn't Peruvian.\"\n\n Foodies in America have for years awaited the triumphant arrival of Peruvian cuisine, long ago designated the next big dining trend. Until Picca came along, only ceviche\u2014raw fish marinated in citrus juice\u2014had made notable inroads. Picca offers ceviche, of course. It's inevitable on a menu with more than fifty items. The selection of dishes, almost all small, reveals the multitude of influences in the Peruvian larder: Spanish, African, French, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. A fantastic dish was tuna tartare with avocado and lemon-soy dressing, so fresh it practically floated off the plate. Zarate called it pure Peruvian, a play on ceviche. He modernizes such Peruvian classics as anticuchos (brochettes) and causas (potato cakes). The most perfectly ecuted anticucho featured small, sweet scallops, and my favorite causa was topped with spicy yellowtail.\n\n Picca's success can be measured by the number of items that emerge daily from its undersized kitchen. Although the dining room seats not even one hundred customers and is open only for dinner, on some nights more than a thousand plates of food are served. -Alan Richman\n\nDessert of the Year Coconut, Rhubarb\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nJuan Contreras, called \"a crazy-gifted man\" by my waiter at Atelier Crenn, can't stop at two elements. The name is a tease. Under a frozen white canvas of coconut mousse is calamansi sorbet, poached rhubarb, mint ice, sake-tea gel\u00E9e, and more. Refreshing and magnetically appealing. Has everything. More significantly, it has nothing: It's nondairy, nut-free, and gluten-free. -Alan Richman\n\nFacebookPinterestMiso-cured haddock, prepared while you watch with a drink in hand.\n\n5. The Best Duet in Nashville\n\nFour nights a week, seven courses, two chefs, and twenty seats around a single chef's table. It's not what you expect in Nashville, but chefs Erik Anderson and Josh Habiger met in 2006 at Alinea, the Chicago temple of culinary innovation, and devised a plan \"to bring Nashville a really fuckin' awesome restaurant.\" In October, that's what they did.\n\n The Catbird Seat is perched above The Patterson House, Nashville's finest cocktail joint, and stands out as a hybrid of highbrow cooking and chilled-out southern charm. To salute Nashville's famous hot chicken (a local specialty of fried bird doused in hot sauce), the boys came up with a chile-flake-coated chip of chicken skin that packs all the crunchy lusciousness of southern fried chicken in a single bite. A plate of vanilla-bean cake and charred-oak ice cream is scattered with glistening balls that look like salmon roe but are really made of Bulleit bourbon. The drinks are just as inventive, but even more intoxicating is the vibe behind the chef's table while Anderson and Habiger work, finishing each other's dishes and sentences. It feels like you wound up with two totally sweet roommates who just happen to be world-class chefs. -Jessica Glavin\n\nFacebookPinterestCold noodles with black sesame, almond milk, and heirloom\n\n4. The Pop-up That Endured\n\nThe bright yellow canopy still reads lung shan restaurant, but Lung Shan and its seven kinds of chow mein are gone. Only the pop-up tenant, Mission Chinese Food, remains. For more than a year they coexisted, sharing a kitchen, although not equitably, according to Mission Chinese chef Danny Bowien. \"We have four burners and one shitty oven that doesn't work,\" he told me. It was a fascinating arrangement, two dissimilar Chinese restaurants with the same space, the same tables, practically the same opening hours.\n\n Mission Chinese offered kung pao pastrami\u2014the meat homemade, the drippings used in a smoky beef-brisket noodle soup. Lung Shan had kung pao chicken and other standards. Somebody at Lung Shan read the tea leaves, or maybe the profit-and-loss statement, and the once uneasy partners cordially merged.\n\nFacebookPinterestBeef brisket with smoked cola barbecue sauce and white bread.\n\nNow the food is pure Mission Chinese: mostly Chinese, somewhat American, occasionally spicy, a bit unorthodox, absolutely brilliant.\n\n Last year Bowien said, \"I don't know how to make Chinese food.\" His critique of his two cooks was the same. Now, he admits, \"we're definitely finding our stride.\" His menu lists twenty-seven items, most under $12, nothing for more than $17. He does takeout and delivery, too.\n\n The dishes at Mission Chinese were wonderful from the start, prepared with ingredients such as Benton's Tennessee bacon. More significant was the cooking of Bowien, a natural. A few years ago he won a pesto-making contest in Genoa, the home of pesto. It was the first time he ever made it. After that, how difficult can it be to turn out silken egg custard with uni and trout roe, my favorite Mission Chinese dish? -Alan Richman\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n3. No Holds Barred, Nothing Left Behind\n\nSo, you're Grant Achatz, Chicago's only Michelin three-star chef, having earned the right to open any restaurant you damn well please. Let the mind drift. How about a place called Moon, where guests are invited to don orange NASA jumpsuits and suck their food from toothpaste tubes? Or a dining room where you pay to eat in total darkness, which not only exists but now verges on a clich\u00E9 soon to be found at your local mall. Few restaurants are able to transcend superstar chefs, genre, or gimmick and sell themselves on pure concept without sounding as if the demiurge (a) has lost his precious marbles or (b) is working overtime to give new resonance to the acronym \"WTF?\" But then came Achatz's whimsical offering: Next is America's first time-travel restaurant, operating in ever changing four-month rotations. Starting last April with \"Paris 1906,\" a riff on Escoffier's turn-of-the-century Ritz, the restaurant reimagined the pleasures of the day, replete with turtle soup and foie gras torchon. After that came an entirely reconstituted Next, under the rubric \"A Taste of Thailand.\" Both Paris and Thailand had their delectable high points\u2014lamb with tomato b\u00E9arnaise, wild catfish in Thai caramel sauce\u2014but thrilling as it may have been to connect the dots of global cuisine and wormhole through culinary history, the restaurant seemed a work in progress, more clinically perfect than emotionally epiphanic, more broadly conceived than specific. Now that the kitchen and waitstaff have worked out some of the kinks, one begins to sense the fuller promise: the ability to recover lost food and tastes, and with them perhaps some satchel, too, of lost memories. Up next at Next: a thirty-course menu that reveals the evolution of Ferran Adri; at the now defunct El Bulli, with Adri&amp;amp;#xE0; collaborating on the selection of dishes. For those who never made the trip to Roses, Spain, for dinner, here's a chance to realize that dream while bearing gastronomic witness to the birth of modern cuisine.  And with its dynamic shape-shifting conceit\u2014its ever changing menu and themes\u2014it seems sure at some point that Next will become the restaurant of your lost dreams, too. -Michael Paterniti\n\nFacebookPinterestScallop-and-Dungeness-crab dumplings in cherrystone-clam dashi.Evan Sung\n\n2. Our Finest Japanese Import\n\nLeft A shochu-and-kiwi cocktail\u2014one of many reasons to stop by the bar.\n\n This is the most wonderful food you'll eat that's nothing like any food you've had before. It's an inspired modern interpretation of kaiseki, the Japanese style of dining that's an artistic sequence of dishes as well as the Asian answer to haute cuisine.\n\n Chef Isao Yamada and a team of cooks from Osaka collaborated with David Bouley to create dishes more imaginative and sumptuous than traditional kaiseki. Yamada says that was in part due to Bouley's influence but also indicative of a growing trend in Japan, where diners have embraced French food.\n\n Kaiseki has nothing to do with sushi or tempura, the Japanese foods best known in America, although the menus do include sashimi, and vegetarian options are plentiful. The meals at Brushstroke are entirely about luxury and superb ingredients, such as a giant Pacific oyster in a rice-wine-and-mustard vinaigrette with plum-wine gel\u00E9e; a lobster tail and lobster dumpling in an extravagant cherrystone-clam broth; breast of duck over roasted Japanese eggplant with mustard-miso dressing; and absolutely the most implausibly delicious dessert I've ever eaten: soy-milk panna cotta over sweetened red beans topped with green-tea sauce. Have there ever been more unwelcome ingredients utilized in a sweet? Try one. You'll plead for another.\n\n The room is polished and classic, mostly blond wood. The unusually large open kitchen boasts something not often seen in Japanese restaurants: a female cook. Service is discreet and thoughtful; the plates, bowls, and lacquered trays, exquisite. Thankfully, Brushstroke is not excessively solemn. When I asked Yamada, the chef, how much credit the revered Bouley deserved for Brushstroke, he replied, \"Say 70 to 80 percent in your magazine, but actually it is 20 percent.\" -Alan Richman\n\nFacebookPinterestHiramasa (yellowtail, in layman's terms) with parsnip-sesame cream and grapefruit.\n\n1. Modernism Never Tasted So Good\n\n Contemporary cooking, whether labeled modernist (so 2011) or molecular gastronomy (a term I use, but I'm so 1988), is far more personal and diverse than diners suspect. It's gizmos like combi ovens that confuse the issue, making customers fear that everything they eat is going to be mushy (from sous vide), frozen (from liquid nitrogen), or born of reverse spherification.\n\n Chef Michael Voltaggio has all the gadgets\u2014\"Yeah, I do,\" he admits\u2014but somehow the food at Ink is astonishingly easy to like. That's an attribute he might have picked up running the kitchen at The Bazaar, in L.A., under the playful Jos\u00E9 Andr\u00E9s. His food is also surprisingly soft and soothing, which he says is likely the result of a stint working under a French chef at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Florida. As he puts it, \"If you're going to cook modern, it's nice to have homeyness to the food, too.\"\n\n Now and then something turns out not quite as planned\u2014isn't it always that way with laboratories?\n\nThere's the dish called Young Carrots, decidedly creepy.  Picture, if you can, gnarled vegetation buried in edible soil, a freaky forest tableau. \"Kind of a Tim Burton movie, isn't it?\" Voltaggio asks. \"When we were making it, it ended up a little scary, and we loved it.\"\n\n He calls his food Modern L.A. Cuisine. Voltaggio doesn't try to make too much of this classification or, for that matter, himself. He's got the tattoos, the Top Chef title, and, according to the L.A. Times, culinary groupies lingering at his door, but he says, \"I'm just a cook, man.\" Maybe he is just that.\n\n Ink\u2014not named for his tattoos but for, he hopes, the permanence of his restaurant\u2014is a curious little spot. It looks like it belongs in shoddy downtown L.A., but it's on a stylish segment of Melrose Avenue, across from Alexander McQueen. The previous tenant was a sushi restaurant; the sushi bar is still there, now Ink's cold station. Even a restaurant with Michael Ovitz as a partner needs to save a few bucks.\n\n The tables are butcher block. The chairs are black metal. The floor is polished cement. The ceiling is dropped and curved, seemingly a leftover from '50s L.A. The people dining next to us were certain the place resembled a nineteenth-century bindery.\n\n Every dish I ate was carefully conceived. Some seemed eloquent, like fluke wrapped in romaine, which I was certain represented a death struggle, innocent fish versus deadly undersea predator. (Voltaggio said the presentation simply made the fish easier to eat.)\n\n I had a take on chicken and waffles (boneless chicken, wafer-thin waffles), lamb-neck poutine with yogurt curds spun in a centrifuge, skate wing in a tsunami of manipulated mushrooms, and burnt-wood sabayon atop cr&amp;amp;#xE8;me caramel. I asked him what he had in his kitchen that he loved most, the fancy item that made the most difference in his cooking. \"Salt,\" this modern fellow replied. \"How it's used is the difference between a good restaurant and a bad one.\"-Alan Richman"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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