Marina, San Francisco · restaurant
The menu is a poem — literally, each course arrives preceded by a few lines of verse, and the food lives up to the setup. Twenty-two seats in a spare, precise room where the tasting menu runs seafood-forward California cuisine through a French-technique filter: one dish arrives looking like a Pacific coastline, the cod arranged to trace the shoreline itself. Three Michelin stars and a spot on the World's 50 Best — book months out, clear the evening.