This year’s awards are for restaurants born in 2006—an exceptional vintage, I’d say. The top 10 are already child stars; the next 10, while not quite so precocious, are still well worth a visit. Most of the 20 formed their menus from many small dishes, which outraged some of their more conventional or impatient customers but suited me fine. I’d always rather taste 10 things than three, especially now that rich meats are back on the menu. For the Year of the Dog was also the year of the pig—fat, tasty Berkshire and Berkshire-cross swine, Serrano hams, sweet milk-fed porcelaits and farm-raised not-so-wild boars. Sous-vide cooking was suddenly something to boast about, and peachy, aromatic viognier emerged as the city’s most fashionable white varietal. Bright and brief as a comet, French onion soup reappeared in a number of celebrated venues, then vanished again for another generation. While hip fusion cooks played Name That Chili, the hard-core chefs entered the charcuterie stakes, vying to see who had the knobbliest salami and who could smoke, cure or otherwise chasten the most esoteric body part. Retro but so à la mode, slow but sophisticated, simultaneously frugal and decadent, cutting-edge cold cuts oozing umami helped make Cava my number one.