How we did it: The Sacramento Bee’s 2024 Top 50 Restaurants list
Benjy Egel is The Sacramento Bee’s food and drink writer and the author of the 2024 Top 50 Restaurants list.
What’s the opposite of a thankless job? A thankful job? ... That doesn’t seem quite right.
I’ll evidently need a bigger thesaurus to aptly describe the process of selecting the Sacramento region’s Top 50 Restaurants. This is the third such iteration and the first since 2022 and, yes, dining out at 100+ of the area’s best eateries to cultivate the list is every bit as fun as it sounds.
It’s a joy, but it’s still a job. Being selected to or omitted from the Top 50 Restaurants list can seriously change a local business’s bottom line. And, personally, it’s my credibility at stake: Why should someone trust my advice on where to eat if the recommendations are lazy or the food mediocre?
This year’s selection process started, as all fun does, with a spreadsheet. There I listed all Top 50 Restaurants from the 2022 list up for a refreshed look, along with the five Readers Choice nominees.
I then added another 40 or so restaurants I thought ought to be considered from credible recommendations, past meals and my general knowledge of the capital region’s dining scene. Others such as Fresh Off Da Boat by Chef T landed on my radar during my day-to-day coverage throughout the year and subsequently made the final list.
From there, it was off to the restaurants — three or four reviews per week, five or six dishes at each stop, sampling the house classics as well as the boundary-pushers. I dined with friends, family and colleagues whose taste buds I trust, picking their brains at each stop: “Are you getting cinnamon here?” “That’s really good frying, isn’t it?” “Is this criminally under-salted, or do I have COVID?”
At the end of the day, the main question I strived to answer was this: How good is this restaurant at what they’re trying to be? That meant weighing restaurants on a variety of factors including flavor, presentation, creativity, service and harmony of ingredients. Execution reigns — bland flavors plated nicely and brought with a smile do not make for a memorable meal.
A holistic, practical encompassing of the Sacramento area’s best restaurants needs diversity — in cuisines, in geographic location and in price point. This is not a collection of Sacramento’s fanciest restaurants or those closest to the state Capitol. If that was the case, North Highlands’ excellent El Parian Taqueria, for example, wouldn’t have made it.
Yet Sacramento’s city core is a natural hub for many of the region’s most ambitious chefs and restaurateurs. Readers should eat fish tacos at El Parian, but those who splurge on a meal at, say, Localis get to experience the apex of Sacramento’s farm-to-fork scene.
My reservations were always made under a pseudonym, but I didn’t bother with disguises. That means the chefs I’ve interviewed for news articles over the past seven years occasionally recognized me. Preferential treatment was rarely an issue; on the few occasions it was, I looked at how tables around me were treated and took what I could from that.
As my gut swelled, so did my expense account and appreciation for The Sacramento Bee’s relatively healthy financial shape. I never accept free meals from restaurants, in keeping with The Bee’s ethics policy, and so having an employer able and willing to fund the requisite reviews for nearly a year was essential to pulling this project off.
This Top 50 list spans the region, from Winters to Placerville, and more than 25% of the restaurants are new additions from 2022. Still, I am but one food writer, and there are always restaurants that people feel were snubbed.
Give the Top 50 list a read, then write in the restaurant you think should have made it in our online survey. The five highest vote-getters will be added to the list as Readers Choice selections, and I’ll be sure to review them myself.
This story was originally published November 14, 2024 at 5:00 AM.