The Ten best restaurants in New York City, according to whom?

I have had it with Best Of lists.

The ten best restaurants in New York. The fifty greatest hotels in the world. The seven sandwiches you must eat before you die which seems unnecessarily threatening for lunch.

According to whom?

Whenever I see one of these lists, I want details. Who voted? How many people participated? What was the criteria? Was there an actual survey, or did one twenty-six-year-old writer with an expense account have a particularly good Thursday?

“Best” sounds impressively scientific. It suggests clipboards, blind tastings and perhaps a small team from PricewaterhouseCoopers guarding the results.

Taste is personal.

One person’s perfect restaurant is an intimate twelve-seat room serving a seventeen-course tasting menu involving foam, tweezers and a mushroom that has been emotionally prepared for the evening.

Another person wants excellent pasta, a comfortable chair and a waiter who does not explain the carrot for six minutes.

Are we measuring the food? Service? Atmosphere? Value? Creativity? Noise level? The likelihood of being seated within an hour of the reservation we made six weeks ago?

Price rarely seems to matter. Apparently, a restaurant can be called one of New York’s best values if dinner costs only slightly more than replacing a household appliance.

Location matters too. A charming neighborhood bistro where the owner knows your name may provide a far better evening than the fashionable place where you are given ninety minutes to eat and gently reminded that your table is needed by people more important than you.

Then there is timing. Restaurants change. Chefs leave. Menus drift. Service collapses. A place praised in March may be running entirely on reputation and truffle oil by October.

I am not against recommendations. I love hearing about a wonderful new restaurant, hotel or hidden bakery. Just tell me who is recommending it and why.

Say, “These are ten restaurants our critic loved for inventive cooking.” Or, “Readers voted these their favorite affordable neighborhood spots.” That gives me something useful.

But stop presenting personal preference as revealed truth from the culinary heavens.

There is no single best restaurant in New York. The best restaurant is the one that suits the evening: the celebration, the budget, the company and attitude free service. If the server is so important, run for political office.

Sometimes it is a Michelin-starred dining room.

Sometimes it is the little Italian place around the corner where the pasta is good, the wine is generous and nobody tells you that the beet represents the chef’s complicated relationship with his father.

Now that is a metric I can trust.