Sunday Special: What Makes a Restaurant Great?

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month, The Times released a list of the 50 best restaurants in America. The Food desk’s reporters, critics and editors crisscrossed the country from Portland, Ore., to Deer Isle, Maine, to scout places formal and casual, big and small, experimental and classic. Their survey is an evocation of what it’s like to dine out, right now, in America. On today’s episode, Gilbert sits down with the Food reporters Priya Krishna and Brett Anderson, two contributors to the list, for a veritable feast of dining wisdom. They discuss what makes a restaurant worthy of the 50 best list, how they go about finding those restaurants, and the dining trends they’re loving and hating in 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to the Daily Sunday special.
0:09.1	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and every Sunday I'm here talking with my colleagues about culture of all sorts, which often means movies and TV and books and stuff like that.
0:21.6	But this week, wonderfully, deliciously, we're talking about food.
0:27.4	So this month, the Times released a list of the 50 best restaurants in America.
0:31.7	And it's an amazing thing that the reporters and critics and editors in our food department did. They crisscrossed
0:38.7	the country and wrote about all sorts of places, casual, fancy, big, small, and somehow
0:46.5	they came up with this list that represents the state of modern dining in America.
0:52.2	Luckily, today, I have two of those people here with me to talk about that list.
0:58.0	Priya Krishna, who wrote a lot about Texas for this project.
1:01.0	It's where she's from.
1:02.3	Hello, Priya.
1:03.0	Hi.
1:03.8	And then Brett Anderson, who is based in New Orleans, one of my favorite food cities.
1:08.8	Brett, happy to have you here.
1:10.5	It's great to be here.
1:12.6	Okay.
1:13.6	So you all on the food desk have been doing this list for, I don't know, five years now.
1:20.5	Five years.
1:21.7	Really?
1:22.2	Is it the fifth one?
1:23.9	2001, 21, 22, 23, 24, that's going to do the math.
1:26.6	So you've been doing this list for five years now, in addition to smaller, but equally
	...

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