An Alternative Top-30 Restaurant Guide

The problem with any trip to New York, aside from the cost, a frustrating inability to eat everything you want to eat, and again, the cost, is that no matter where you live, inevitably you’ll have to come home to your city's comparative small town-ness. Eventually you will get back, and eventually you will wake up hungry once again, somehow find new funds to go out to eat, and with brow furrowed, hoping for inspiration, peruse a list of the top restaurants in town.

You might happen upon the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Top 30 Restaurants, Ranked. At which point you'd be met with the usual, yearly suspects: your James Beard nominees, your spendy suburban steakhouse, trendy hotel fare. In short, you'll get the old school, parochial food journalism.

But then you might flash back to that last day in Brooklyn, where you found yourself ambling up the avenue of Puerto Rico, toward East Williamsburg, past a Russian bar, an Indian restaurant, countless pizza places, toward a Lebanese joint named Wafa's. A spot with mom cooking, son prepping, some kind of tertiary uncle schlepping meat back to the kitchen from the rear of a double-parked Cherokee, with wafts of steaming kafta, plumes of roasting eggplant, spits spinning toward infinity with lamb and Middle Eastern promise, pungent, garlicky homemade hot sauce, and the most juice-spurting of chicken shawerma. It's the spot that would rightly make you wonder why you fretted for so long over reservations at Peter Luger Steakhouse—with button-down aesthetic, comically brusque waiters, instagramming tourists, loud mouth brokers seemingly still high on the last viewing of Wall Street. In short, Wafa's is the kind of spot to remind of the magic of going out to eat, of digging for another world.

Maybe it's just a penchant for the esoteric. For finding one's own hidden gems. But it gets at a deeper issue: even the New York Times' stodgy Pete Wells, in his Top New York Restaurants of 2016 piece, recognizes that "the growing distance between the very rich and everybody else is replicated, in miniature and with less alarming implications, in the city’s restaurant scene." Then he gives thanks for the fact he's able to include three places in his Top 10 that "bowed to more moderate budgets."

Now, with the rise of egalitarian treatment of low and high food, with the revelatory genius of Jonathan Gold, with the likes of Eater’s Essential New York Restaurants placing hipster pizza and downhome barbecue alongside the likes of old guard’s like Luger, it seems that, away from haute cuisine and fine French, the valet-level expectations, real food is elsewhere. We're past the point where we should confuse how the mouth feels with a price tag, with professional courtesies and hot hostesses, with overpriced wine, with a need to iron your pants, with some kind of perceived taste quality corollary to the bill amount.

Sure, I've never been to Sanford, but neither have the vast majority of Milwaukeeans. For the rest, there might exist a counter list, for the everyman, for the family, for midweek, for those who prefer steak tacos to steak houses. For those who believe the spice of life is, well, spice itself. And who think the best cook is still grandma, or, in a pinch, mom.