THE WORLD TABLE

The restaurants on this site are Reno-Tahoe's best. But the perspective behind them comes from somewhere larger.

For more than two decades, I have been chasing the world's great tables — from Osteria Francescana in Modena to the Chef’s counter at Frantzén in Stockholm, from the two-Michelin-starred Clove Club in London to SingleThread in Healdsburg, where Chef Kyle Connaughton has built something that can only be described as Japan through a Sonoma lens — one foot firmly in each culture, the result entirely its own.

I have eaten at more than 40 three-star restaurants on four continents. Not as a critic, but as someone who believes that eating well is one of the most sincere ways to understand a place and the people behind it.

That experience is why the Essential 20 exists. When I tell you a table in Reno is worth your time, it comes from someone who eats in Nevada because these tables are genuinely worth it — not because there's nothing better out there, but because great food doesn't require a passport or a reservation six months in advance. Sometimes it's a taco off a truck, or an Awful Awful eaten standing in an alley, or a bowl of scampi at a dive bar in Sparks on a Friday night

The World Table is where I write about those other meals. The ones that shaped how I eat, how I write, and what I look for when I walk into any room anywhere in the world. They are not Reno stories. But they are very much part of the same story.