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.
Smyth 🇺🇸
Smyth had what it took to reach the very top of the culinary world. I believed that from the first meal. What begins as a hunger to be great matures over time into the quiet art of excellence — and in May 2026, in New Orleans, the culinary world confirmed what those of us who have sat in that room, watched Chef Shields work, and felt the warmth of that team have known for years. Smyth is the best restaurant in North America. It always had the intention.