More Than Food for Thought

The 2026 Restaurant List – 50 places in America that most excited the New York Times’ reviewers – came out earlier this month. It’s a broadly diverse group. It includes Tin Tin in Miami, a place that serves Cuban French dishes such as snapper fillet enveloped by a cloud of potato puree.

The list pays equal tribute to Kouklas Greek Eatery in Niles, Illinois, where diners feast on spicy tirokafteri dip, grilled oysters, souvlaki and Greek salad. Praise also goes to Charleston, South Carolina’s Merci, a French Lowcountry bistro that indulges in curveballs like house-made focaccia heaped with stracciatella and Benton’s ham – “a croque-monsieur with a drawl.”

Or how can you resist Titusz, a Pittsburgh restaurant that serves Austrian Hungarian fare: chilled sorrel soup with kornspitz croutons followed by a roasted duck leg bathed in an apricot-reisling reduction?

Washington state made this year’s list with two establishments quite unlike others. Chef Johnny Spiro, whose D.C. place won a Michelin star, moved to Whidbey Island to open Passage restaurant in Langley. Mainland visitors travel there by state ferry, often after waiting an hour or two to travel across Puget Sound. Chef Spiro serves a changing menu that features top-quality local seafood, perhaps halibut sauced with yuzu and chili oil or a geoduck crudo in an emulsion of mussels. Diners on post-meal walks might see orcas gliding through Saratoga Passage.

An even more far-out dining experience can be found on the western shore of Hood Canal. Hama Hama Oyster Saloon is a casual outdoor dining spot that serves seafood cuisine: clam chowder, fish and chips and poached oysters. Diners sit at waterside picnic tables tucked beneath rustic shelters while they savor bi-valves that the Robbins family pulls fresh from the canal’s gin-clear waters.

When introducing the 2026 restaurant list, New York Times food editor Brian Gallagher writes that “A restaurant can be a place like any other – tables, chairs, staff, food. But a great restaurant is a place like no other.”

A great restaurant’s unique quality could be found in the chef’s ability to combine unusual flavors, or it might just be in the way you can linger chatting with dinner companions. Perhaps it’s the chef’s way of preparing an old standard. Let’s just say that in order to excite the New York Times’ critics, the place exhibited a special bit of genius.

Dinning out in Western Washington as in other areas around the country is always an adventure, the pursuit of an experience. It is gratifying to see Passage and Hama Hama Oyster Saloon join this region’s great favorites, places like Le Pichet in Seattle’s downtown, Canlis on the side of Queen Anne Hill, Bar del Corso on Beacon Hill, Communion and Ba Bar in the Central District.