In Search of the Best Restaurant

This Brooklyn classic has bumped my longtime favorite: Here's why

The namesake dish at Pyza

In American Fried, Calvin Trillin wrote in the 1970s, “It has long been acknowledged that the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue” — referring to a venerable pit in his hometown of Kansas City. I’ve actually visited Arthur Bryant’s for the purpose of verifying that Trillin’s statement is true. I’d have to say my conclusion was a toss-up: I was very happy eating the pork ribs there, yet I was constantly casting my mind back to barbecues in Lockhart, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Owensboro, Kentucky, that I thought equally as good.

Jonathan Gold and Peter Meehan at Arthur Bryant’s, Kansas City, 2012

What does “best” mean? Certainly it’s more than the spectacular taste of a single dish. It is admittedly a very personal designation, and since then I have always maintained a personal idea of a best restaurant in the world, not only in emulation of Trillin — the father of modern food writing — but as a lodestar for myself. And it changes from time to time.

For years the best was Sri Ganesh Dosa House in Jersey City’s India Square. As the elephant god looks on from his modest shrine, an employee stuffs crisp dosas with a potato masala. Behind the counter, the dosa machine — looking something like a small cement mixer — rotates noisily. Not only do I love the dosas, which in their vegan composition and reduced energy requirements for cooking, constitute one of the world’s best and most earth-friendly eats, but I am equally fond of the porridge called upma, and the bouncy idly dumplings in their various formulations.