1 Ohio entry makes The Restaurant List: New York Times’ 50 best places to eat in America

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The New York Times is out with The Restaurant List, a compilation of the 50 best places to eat in America, and Ohio garnered one nod.

The list covers a wide range of culinary approaches, from turkey barbecue in Kansas to a steakhouse in Miami. Big cities (New York), midsize cities (Traverse City, Michigan) and even remote spots (Deer Isle, Maine) all made the list.

The Times notes a couple of unique points in its methodology: Each year’s list is entirely different from the previous year’s, and more than half of the restaurants on the 2025 compilation have opened since the 2024 list was published.

The media company said 14 of its reporters and editors took 76 flights to eat more than 200 meals in 33 states. They dined based on an old-fashioned but important principle: They showed up unannounced, making reservations via an app. They accepted no freebies. (Cleveland.com had the same anonymous approach with two visits per restaurant when we ran restaurant reviews, which we halted during the coronavirus pandemic.)

Wildweed, an Italian restaurant that opened in July 2024 in Cincinnati, is Ohio’s lone entry. No place in Cleveland – Cordelia? – made the list.

The Times tabbed Wildweed chef-co-owner David Jackman “a forager, gardener, fermenter and more.” A recent tasting menu contained half as many options as the restaurant’s à la carte menu, the paper said.

“Jackman, who owns Wildweed with his wife, Lydia, is cooking like Southwest Ohio lit a fire inside him. Long may it burn,” Brett Anderson of The Times wrote.

The list covers 28 states and Washington, D.C., with 13 having more than one restaurant. California led the way with six.

Here is the full list.