About The Sharp Table
The Sharp Table is one person’s opinion about restaurants worth planning around.
Specifically: the restaurants that justify the flight, the reservation effort, the wait. Not the trending opens, not the brand outposts, not the rooms designed to be photographed instead of eaten in.
Coverage starts where I’ve actually eaten. Places I haven’t eaten at don’t get coverage I can’t stand behind.
How rankings work
I rank from firsthand experience — usually multiple visits, often years of them. Vegas alone is dozens of meals at the omakase counters that anchor the city. Copenhagen was a trip built specifically around eating at the places that define that scene right now.
I rank what I know. I leave out what I don’t.
There’s no algorithm, no scoring rubric pretending to be one, no list of 50 restaurants that’s really just SEO bait.
What’s not covered
Most things, deliberately.
I don’t review cities I haven’t lived in or returned to enough. I don’t do “best new opens” coverage — too fast a treadmill, too easy to be wrong. I don’t write about chains, hotel restaurants masquerading as destination dining, or the slightly-better-Salt-Bae category that defines a lot of “luxury” dining now.
If a restaurant isn’t on the site, it might mean I haven’t been. It might also mean I have, and I didn’t think it was worth your hard earned money.
A note on reservations
Some reservation links on the site are affiliates. Specifically: Prima links in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York coverage, where Prima has direct concierge relationships with the restaurants. Everywhere else, the links route to the restaurant’s preferred platform — OpenTable, Tock, Resy, or direct booking — with no kickback.
I only recommend places I’d recommend anyway. The affiliate side is downstream of the editorial, not the other way around.
Why anyone reads this
Friends and family have asked me where to eat for years. The Sharp Table is the version of those conversations I’d give a stranger — direct, specific, and built on experience, not aggregate internet reviews.
If you find it useful, that’s the whole point.
— Jay