I always find these lists interesting, although I can always quibble. I've been following San Francisco's restaurants more or less since the 70s.
By MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez | Updated April 17, 2025 4:06 p.m. - San Francisco Chronicle
As someone who, at a former job, tested a lot of kitchen appliances, I can assure you that determining the best restaurants in the Bay Area is a lot more nuanced than compiling a list of the best blenders. More art, less science, more subjectivity, fewer smoothies. Before we dive into our list of the Top 100 restaurants, my colleague Cesar Hernandez and I want to take a beat to think aloud — what even is a “top restaurant”?
The Chronicle has been selecting cohorts of 100 since 1996, but the 2025 installment is the first since the pandemic upended the restaurant industry as we know it. It’s been six years since we’ve had a Top 100 class, and its return is a celebration of the resilience of our community, of the people behind the food we love. Scrolling through the list feels like flipping through a family photo album, a scrapbook from a year of dining out.
Each year the list has reflected the personal tastes, predilections and biases of the critic or critics behind it. This year is no different. We are but two humans, albeit two humans who eat hundreds of restaurant meals a year, with strong opinions and stronger stomachs. Sometimes we agree with the Michelin Guide or our predecessors Michael Bauer and Soleil Ho, and sometimes we don’t. Usually we agree with each other, and sometimes Cesar is wrong. We stand by this collaborative list, and we are open about our methodology.
To us, a top restaurant might be a multicourse fine dining bonanza from an internationally renowned chef or a bakery serving astonishing tortas trussed in plastic wrap to a line of construction workers. What they have in common is a commitment to doing whatever it is they do with excellence. When assembling this final list, we took into account diversity (there goes my federal grant money) of region, cuisine and price point, keeping in mind our North Star: We want this list to be useful to you, our readers, not a mere artifact or exercise. There are other lists that will tell you which restaurants are the fanciest or the buzziest, but is that really how we eat? As you seek guidance on where to find a breakfast sandwich in Napa or a date-night spot in Oakland, we hope you’ll return to the 2025 Top 100 again and again.
— MacKenzie Chung Fegan
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/top-100-best-restaurants-san-francisco-bay-area/
Greg