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12 months that changed the world of food

It has been a pivotal year for both the restaurant industry and the journalists who cover it. While dozens of high-profile investigations uncovered harassment, wage theft and other abuse in the food world, American restaurant criticism also took a notable shift.

Nyum Bai, a humble Cambodian noodle shop in Oakland run by first-time restaurateur Nite Yun, was the Bay Area’s most decorated restaurant. Yun started the year as a Chronicle Rising Star and was then celebrated by national media outlets like the New York Times, Bon Appetit and Eater, among others. Usually, restaurants that snag such praise are high-end spots, not those with prices under $20.

When we looked at our favorite restaurants of the year, we saw more singularity with creative pasta, mezze platters and pozole verde than with rote tasting menus and tweezer food. That’s not to say high-end dining is absent — two of the most expensive new spots in Palo Alto and San Francisco made our list — but there’s certainly a wider range across the spectrum of price, accessibility and culture.

To me, there’s a similarity here to the music world’s poptimism movement of the early 2000s. In 2004, New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh penned an influential piece arguing that pop music — be it country or hip-hop — deserved the same critical respect (and hence, ink) as the rock genre that had dominated the discourse for decades.

In a similar sense, so much (though not all!) of mainstream food media has been traditionally focused on upscale dining. This is changing, and it’s time to afford the same respect to all genres.