The New York Times released its annual ranking of New York City’s 100 best restaurants this week, and three Upper West Side eateries earned a spot on the closely-watched list. Two of them landed in the top dozen overall, one of them cracked the top five citywide, and a longtime neighborhood institution clung on near the bottom of the ranking. Full breakdown below.
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The 2026 edition — compiled by the Times’ new co-chief critic Ligaya Mishan, who took over the role last summer — returns to numbered placements from No. 100 down to No. 1. That marks a reversal from the 2025 edition, which ranked only the top 10 numerically and listed the remaining 90 restaurants in alphabetical order. Mishan spent roughly ten months eating across the five boroughs before locking in her picks, weighing factors including imagination, ambience, service, technique, and what she described as “New York-iness.”The Caribbean tasting restaurant Kabawa, in the East Village, claimed the No. 1 slot in the 2026 ranking, knocking off last year’s top finisher, the Indian restaurant Semma.
The highest-ranking Upper West Side restaurant — and the only neighborhood eatery to crack the top 10 citywide — is Jean-Georges, the two-Michelin-star French tasting destination at 1 Central Park West (between West 60th and West 61st streets). Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s flagship landed at No. 5 in this year’s edition, a jump of fourteen positions from its No. 19 placement in 2024 (the restaurant was unranked but included in the alphabetical portion of the 2025 list). Mishan wrote that the kitchen’s dishes still have the capacity to surprise diners after nearly three decades — as both feats of engineering and outright pleasures.
The second Upper West Side restaurant in the top dozen is Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, the Afro-Caribbean and American restaurant inside Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. Tatiana was named the No. 1 restaurant in the entire city in both 2023 and 2024 — just months after opening — before sliding to No. 10 in the 2025 alphabetical-leaning edition. This year, it lands at No. 12. Mishan described the restaurant as “scrappy, risky and, even when it’s a little jagged at the edges, beautiful,” and called it a hymn to the city as Onwuachi himself lives it.
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The third Upper West Side restaurant on the 2026 list is Barney Greengrass, the 118-year-old Jewish appetizing institution at 541 Amsterdam Avenue (between West 86th and West 87th streets). The Sturgeon King checked in at No. 92 — a significant slide from the No. 66 position it held in 2024. Mishan praised the precision of the kitchen’s fish work and called the spot a linchpin of Jewish life on the Upper West Side.The lineup itself has stayed remarkably stable year-over-year: the three Upper West Side restaurants on the 2026 list are the same three that earned spots on the 2025 and 2024 editions. As we reported last spring when the 2025 edition dropped and a UWS restaurant lost its long-held No. 1 ranking to a Greenwich Village eatery, Tatiana’s reign atop the list ended last year when Semma claimed the top spot. Semma sits at No. 7 in this year’s ranking.
A handful of other Michelin-starred Upper West Side restaurants did not make this year’s cut, including the three-star Per Se, the two-star Masa, and the one-star Essential by Christophe.
The full 2026 ranking is available here.
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