question. the list was the hardest part and it was always changing as i discovered new places or as i came across new stories. what the book is not: i am not a food critic. i’m a food detective. so in order to be in the book, i looked for restaurants that both had good food—you had to have good food to be in the book—and a good story. so i talk about the cuisine, i talk about the atmosphere, but i don’t rate the restaurants. what i do is tell their stories, whether it is a restaurant that has been passed down through the generations or something else.
so some 