Last Call: Which Restaurants Should Be On Yelp's Top 100 List?

There are over a million restaurants in the good ol' U.S. of A., and statistically they can't all be winners. Quite a few of them can't even manage to be adequate. But according to Yelp, at least 100 of them are very, very good, and now we know which ones they are thanks to this list of the Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S. for 2020. How did the online review site determine which restaurants deserved a spot on this very elite list? No idea! Well, some idea. Says Yelp, "Yelp's data science team pulled the top restaurants by ratings and number of reviews in 2019 across the U.S., with representation based on each place's share of top-rated restaurants nationally, then curated the list with the expertise of our Community Managers around the country to finalize the rankings." That could mean almost anything. I am choosing not to bring my personal (complicated) feelings about Yelp into the mix here, and instead am choosing to celebrate the fact that this is a list of 100 businesses across the nation that could probably use your support more than any chicken-sandwich-slinging national chain.

I've never had the privilege of eating at any of the restaurants that made the list, and have never heard of 99% of them, so I turn to you, our brilliant readers, for insight: Have any of you visited these restaurants, and was the food as good as I'm imagining it to be? And if you, like I, do not recognize any of the spots on the Top 100, which of your local joints would you like to see up there? Personally, I think it's criminal that Brooklyn's Karam and Baltimore's Coelum have not received national awards, and I'm sure you all have similarly passionate opinions.