1. Chez Panisse 1517 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, California 510 . 548.5525 If you want to know why Chez Panisse is the single best restaurant in the United States, just look at a single appetizer served one evening last May. The center of the plate was dominated by an artfully rumpled heap of beyond-organic herbs — microscopic leaves of tarragon, bittersweet curls of baby chicory — and to one side was a trembling bit of broth that stayed jellied just long enough to be spooned up to your mouth. The swath of mayonnaise on the other side of the plate had been made to order. A scattering of crunchy, sharply vinegared wax beans practically vibrated with the sweet crispness of spring. The yolk of a halved soft-boiled farm egg shone as orange as a Van Gogh sunflower. It was the loveliest conceivable expression of a season, of an aesthetic, of a great agricultural region. Where else could you find satori in an egg salad? To be fair, Chez Panisse is barely a restaurant in the usual sense of the word. In its 30 years it has grown from an amateur eating establishment to an institution with a mission, but there is still a single set menu, different each day, and it is served to the restaurant's staff as well as to its customers. Cooks, responsible for but a single dish apiece, may devote as much time to positioning a sprig of chervil as most line cooks do to plating an entire course. Provisioning is considered as important as cooking, and a whole community of bakers, wine importers, and farmers has sprung up in support of the restaurant, which virtually invented the position of forager. And Alice Waters, who may be the most influential figure in the past 30 years of the American kitchen, still seems not so much a chef as a gifted impresario who has mastered the difficult task of coaxing fine chefs (now Christopher Lee and Kelsie Kerr), superb California produce, and her own exquisite sensibility together into shimmering meals as fragile yet as enduring as butterfly wings. 2. Jean Georges 1 Central Park West New York, New York 212 . 299.3900 To Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a tomato broth is less a tomato broth than a vehicle for obscure spices, sautéed lobster, blanched snow peas, and a whisper of fenugreek that floats over the dish like a sigh. An elusive meatiness in his sauce may have been from burnt bread crumbs or from the carcasses of roasted quail. He may serve foie gras pressed between sheets of unsweetened almond pastry, with a garnish of green almonds whose tender crunchiness is more delicate than fresh water chestnuts, or cooked long and slow and served with just a sprinkling of salt. And his waiters anoint sautéed langoustines with what they call "magic potato foam." Chez Panisse and Jean Georges may represent the two opposing schools of American cuisine: the former devoted to displaying nature at its best, the latter determined to bend nature to its will. 3. The French Laundry 6640 Washington Street Yountville, California 707 . 944.2380 It was after 11 p.m. when the ninth (or was it the tenth?) course arrived — surpassingly tender walnut-strewn ricotta gnocchi you'd offer to the gods. Someone said these were the best gnocchi he'd ever eaten, and we all laughed. We'd been singing the same tune all night. Thomas Keller is widely regarded as the most gifted American chef of his generation. Where others aspire to cook good food, he pursues something larger and more elusive, as though through food fundamental truths are revealed. There had been quite a few: an eggshell of white truffle custard with a jaunty truffle wafer; a pellucid lobster consommé of startling intensity; truffled hand-cut tagliatelle richer than Piedmontese tajarin. Among several fish was a delicate poached Atlantic black bass with ramps, spring onions, pearl onions, and sauce Soubise — an eloquent essay on onion personality. Interesting cheeses were yet to come, and later a blueberry pot de crème, and an Alsatian rhubarb tart that left further exploration of the subject superfluous. You don't forget a dinner like that, ever. 4. Spago Beverly Hills 176 North Canon Drive Beverly Hills, California 310 . 385.0880 The party had already moved to Spago Beverly Hills before the farewell dinner in March at Wolfgang Puck's original Spago on the Sunset Strip. With all the kissing, hand stroking, and table hopping going on in the chic new location, you'd think that chef Lee Hefter had slipped something into the sparkling gazpacho or that Sherry Yard had discovered aphrodisiacal strawberries for her seminal shortcake and its rosy sorbet. But no, it's just the passion they put into an exciting, ever-changing menu. The high-voltage scene is fun, but what you eat and how you're served (even when nobody knows who you are) frequently add up to a seriously glamorous dining experience that few other restaurants ever achieve. 5. Highlands Bar & Grill 2011 11th Avenue South Birmingham, Alabama 205 . 939.1400 When we dream about an American restaurant, it looks and smells a lot like Highlands Bar & Grill: a gleaming, big-city place with the precise buttery glow of our favorite Parisian bistros and professional waiters who are both knowledgeable and kind. The wine list, densely packed with American and southern French bottles, was obviously put together by somebody who likes to drink wine more than he likes to show it off. Frank Stitt's cooking, which showcases Gulf seafood, splendid Alabama produce, and southern staples like grits, pan-roasted rabbit, and country ham, is both all-American and extremely French — as if Alabama were somehow sandwiched between Mississippi and Provence. If Alabama really did border Provence, Stitt's lightly hickory-smoked pork loin with braised pork shank and collard greens might be a border-town favorite, a shotgun marriage between bistro and barbecue. Don't miss the milkshake made with perfectly ripe Alabama strawberries and freshly turned ice cream. 6. Alan Wong's Restaurant 1857 South King Street Honolulu, Hawaii 808 . 949.2526 Hawaiian cooking is, of course, the original fusion — an organic, street-level blend of Chinese, Polynesian, and mainland American influences, lightly seasoned with imports from Japan, Mexico, and Korea, then filtered through the fine mesh of international hotel-school cuisine. And Alan Wong is the master blaster of Hawaiian eats, not just reinterpreting island dishes like loco moco and huli huli chicken in the way that, say, Roger Vergé confronts bouillabaisse, but using the basic building blocks of native Hawaiian luau cooking — stewed taro leaf, long rice, poi, lomi lomi salmon, kalua pig — to construct a devastatingly delicious alternative universe of his own. 7. Charlie Trotter's 816 West Armitage Avenue Chicago, Illinois 773 . 248.6228 In his story "The Aleph," Jorge Luis Borges describes a point in which all other points are contained, a vantage from which every single thing in the world can be seen. And when you are in a certain state of mind, a meal at Charlie Trotter's can seem like the culinary equivalent of the Aleph: foods plucked from every cuisine and every country in the world, impeccably prepared and combined in a way that allows each of them to be seen clearly but stripped of any context other than that of the restaurant. In one meal, you may experience 75 different things — pigs' feet, blood sausage, cannellini beans, yuzu, horseradish, Lucini olive oil — combined in a dozen different dishes; in the next, the flavors may be exactly the same, but the dishes in which they appear will be completely different. In a way, the dizzy floating feeling of Trotter's geography-free universe is appropriate. For what could be a more typical Chicago experience than endlessly circling above O'Hare airport? 8. Ginza Sushiko 218 North Rodeo Drive Beverly Hills, California 310 . 247.8939 Even those who know sushi best bow before the artistry and personal charm of Masa Takayama, whose admirers fly in from all over the world. His restaurant Ginza Sushiko has only nine seats at the maple counter (plus a few more in a private room), so prospective diners without reservations are shooed away. For each guest, Takayama creates a kaiseki-like succession of seasonal dishes, none of which are ever the same twice. Among the delicacies, on an ascending scale of exquisiteness, are imported saltwater hamo — a delicious, extremely bony fish that requires a special knife to prepare — as well as the winter crabs called kegani, and fugu, the potentially lethal blowfish that some Japanese say, only partly in jest, they'd gladly die for. In autumn, he may compose small masterpieces of matsutake mushrooms grilled on a red clay hibachi, itself a work of art. "The ginjo sake you sip as an apéritif is very special," Takayama says; to produce it, every grain of rice is peeled and only its center used. This is undoubtedly the most expensive sushi experience outside of Japan. It is also incomparable. 9. Daniel 60 East 65th Street New York, New York 212 . 288.0033 Daniel exemplifies a great French restaurant so completely that it could be typecast as one in the movies. There are grand tiers of hors d'oeuvres to begin with, and baskets of madeleines at the end. The wine list is slipcovered in two volumes, like a fine edition of Voltaire. The waiters, who are otherwise splendid, find it impossible to stifle a sigh when they feel you have made an uninspired choice. You will find every French luxury ingredient imaginable, from truffles to foie gras, early asparagus to fresh morels (although the dish we've loved there lately involved humble French sardines, seared crisp and served with peeled — peeled! — cherry tomatoes). The restaurant even imports its own Iranian caviar, which at Christmastime is troweled onto dishes so thickly it boggles the mind. Yet none of the extravagance, the napery, the squab would matter much without the piercing intelligence of Daniel Boulud's approach to classical French cooking. His kitchen gets more flavor from a simple bell pepper than most restaurants can from a whole truckload of foie gras. 10. Le Bernardin 155 West 51st Street New York, New York 212 . 554.1515 If imperial Rome had decided to erect a temple to seafood cookery, it could never have come up with an edifice half as magnificent as Le Bernardin, an imposing chunk of Manhattan real estate devoted to the monkfish, the scallop, and the steamed striped bass, the tuna, the snapper, and the roasted dorade — plus, of course, the imposing array of white Burgundies, Alsatian Rieslings, and New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs required to pay proper homage to the fish. Here is fluke, served raw in four different sauces that flicker into motion across the tongue the way an old kinescope flickers across the eye; here, too, is the famous "croque monsieur" stuffed with smoked salmon and the best Iranian caviar. Chef Eric Ripert amuses himself by plopping a barely warmed fillet of salmon into a truffled pot-au-feu, by saucing fried cod with veal gravy, by serving crunchy-crusted monkfish in a peppermint-scented tagine…which somehow, appealing both to our taste for the magisterial as well as to our liking for fish, is as satisfying as a Beaumarchais comedy.