2 North Carolina Restaurants Make Daily Meal’s 101 Best In US

CHARLOTTE, NC — If you’re looking to dine out more as the weather gets warmer, we’ve got some tasty news for you.

The Daily Meal recently unveiled its list for the “101 Best Restaurants In America,” and the online food and dining site included three restaurants from North Carolina.

Here are the best restaurants in our state, according to the Daily Meal’s rankings.

Lantern, Chapel Hill, N.C.

• Ranking: No. 34
• Says The Daily Meal, “Chef Andrea Reusing’s Lantern is an Asian-influenced Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant with a strong priority for using local ingredients and has won widespread recognition. The menu is variable, but standouts include local beef sashimi with smoked chestnuts, salt and pepper shrimp with fried jalapenos, a hotpot with housemade soba, and steamed wild local black bass with local bok choy.”

Curate, Asheville, N.C.

• Ranking: No. 82
• Says The Daily Meal, “Katie Button, the chef/owner of Cúrate, a popular tapas bar located in Asheville, North Carolina, spent time working under Spanish masters José Andrés and Ferran Adrià before opening the restaurant along with her husband Félix Meana in 2011. Since then, Cúrate has become one of Asheville’s most beloved restaurants, with an all-Spanish wine list and an attached vermouth bar. The menu, as all great tapas menus are, is sprawling, but don’t miss the patatas bravas, housemade morcilla, seasonal vegetable paella and baked-to-order Marcona almond tart.

Alinea, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago, was ranked as the No. 1 eatery in the United States, according to the Daily Meal. The top five restaurants were rounded out by Eleven Madison Park in New York City, Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, Le Bernardin in New York City and Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia.

“These 101 restuarants serve food that’s thoughtful and thought-provoking, and they also have a dining room and a level of service that suit the quality of what’s on the plate, a good beverage list and a true sense of personality, imagination and consistency,” authors of the Daily Meal rankings wrote in an introductory statement to the list. “Visiting one of these restaurants feels like a truly memorable culinary experience.”

To compile the rankings, the Daily Meal contacted hundreds of dining experts around the country to ask which restaurants they considered the absolute best in their respective cities. Those restaurants were then added to other establishments that have “garnered near-universal acclaim” and eateries that have been featured on previous Daily Meal lists.

The remaining restaurants were subsequently ranked according to metrics such as food, service, beverage options and environment.

The full list of the 101 best restaurants is available on the Daily Meal.