Surprising Award

At 26th & Valencia (SF Gate photo)

The best new restaurant in the entire country? Bon Appetit says it's Al's Place in San Francisco.
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Though he is careful to praise Al's Place,  the local Chronicle restaurant reporter seems to think that the Bon Appetit award is an overachievement, using phrases such as "cramped kitchen", "quirky restaurant" and "overlooked corner."

Al’s Place is just one of many great new restaurants in the city this year.....Amid a surge of new restaurants in San Francisco — many of them higher-profile and better-funded — Al’s Place has occasionally been lost in the mix.

Aaron London (A.L.) plating stone fruit curry
and black lime cod (SF Gate)

Bon Appetit does give its reasons [bold added]:

By the time I’d finished those pickled french fries—plus dishes of lightly cured trout with crispy potatoes in a strawberry gazpacho, asparagus in a currant soffritto, and pork belly with a galangal reduction—it was obvious that [owner Aaron] London had a knack for showcasing the flavors and textures of vegetables in very nonobvious ways. There was tons more going on in each dish than I got from reading the menu. The intensity of flavors was revelatory. It was almost as though I’d been eating vegetables in black and white my whole life, and then suddenly everything was in Technicolor.

The foodie crowds will take a couple of years to dissipate to the point where the wait for normal diners might be tolerable. I just hope that Aaron London will still have his passion when we're seated in 2018.