Welcome to The 76: A letter from the editor

You can throw a Wawa hoagie and hit a great restaurant in Philly. So what does it mean for a restaurant to be not just great, but essential? This was the question we asked over and over again as we put together the first edition of The 76, our annual list of the most vital places to eat in the Philly area.

A restaurant is vital when you can’t imagine someone understanding what it means to eat in Philly without going there. There are red gravy spots with better food than Villa di Roma, but are any of them as transportive to the Italian Market of 50 years ago? Saad’s Halal Restaurant serves up an iconic sandwich, sure, but it’s also a destination for the region’s Muslim community. Luxe French-ish restaurants and immaculate raw bars and delightful cocktail programs abound, yet none have the scene-straddling verve of My Loup. And it’s hard to conceive of a Chinatown without Sang Kee, or South Philly without John’s Roast Pork (even if its namesake has taken a back seat to cheesesteaks in recent years).

Meanwhile, no one is telling a more artful story about culture and cuisine than Omar Tate at Honeysuckle Provisions, or has imprinted Philly’s restaurant scene as firmly in the national consciousness in recent years as Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon, whose Kalaya remains the most indisputably exhilarating restaurant in a 100-mile radius. Is it a dynamic community institution, like Tierra Colombiana; thoroughly defining a genre, like Pho Ga Thanh Thanh; or reconfiguring how we think about an entire cuisine, like Little Walter’s?

The idea of a definitive restaurant list is far from novel: The Michelin Guide turns 125 next year, and I’ve participated in crafting too many lists to count during my several years at Eater, from annual surveys of the country’s best new restaurants to the most worthwhile cocktail bars in Tokyo. But this conception of The 76 is most specifically indebted to the Los Angeles Times’ 101, created by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jonathan Gold. It set a bar for distilling the essence of a city’s entire restaurant scene into a list with its roving perspective and its equal appreciation of both roadside tacos and avant-garde kitchen pyrotechnics. And while LA has the 101 expressway, no number signifies Philly more than 76. (The idea of 76 Philly restaurants is also not entirely revolutionary: Perhaps you still have a print copy of Craig LaBan’s Savoring Philadelphia, a guide to his 76 favorite restaurants, from 2002, some of which are on this list, too?)

More than just another list — because there are so many lists — or a declaration, the gambit for The 76 is to be useful in your daily eating life. It’s a map of the restaurants that tell you how the region eats right now, a quick way to find the spot you should splurge at (or the opposite) tonight, a comprehensive directory of the restaurant information you want at your fingertips (do you lock down that seat with Resy or OpenTable?), and more to come in the future. This is just the first version, and we want your feedback on how it can be more useful to you as we continue to refine it (and what restaurants you think should’ve been on the list).

In Philly, there’s no reason to ever waste a meal. With The 76, we hope you never have to.