The 2017 Best Restaurant Battle

In December 2017, we had a 64 seed tournament to determine the best restaurant in WNY

Dec 01, 2017

We’ve done Chicken Wings, Pizza and other mini tournaments that may or may not have been tainted by restaurants buying fake twitter votes….but this tournament has been the most difficult to figure out. I’d like to pretend that we spent weeks organizing the 64 seed brackets for our previous tournaments, but we kind of threw most of those together in a couple of days. But when it comes to the Best Restaurant in Buffalo, we have been taking our time making a comprehensive list.

But first things first, what qualifies a restaurant on this list? Here are the loose guidelines we created to make this as fair of a fight as possible.

Semi Fine Dining: We are excluding restaurants that are primarily known as ‘Pubs’ or ‘Bars’ and various ‘Cheap Eats’. The restaurants we chose have a wait staff and are known for being a sit-down dinner spot. Sadly, this excluded some of our favorites like 99 Fast Food, Lloyd Taco Factory, BreadHive Cafe and other great plaes to eat that we consider too casual to compare with places like Hutch’s or Ristorante Lombardo.
Geography: We didn’t want to make a list of just restaurants in city, so we tried to get a decent spread of restaurants among the various neighborhoods and suburbs of the greater Buffalo area. That said, most of these restaurants are in the city (about 2/3) but we include Southtowns, Northtowns and even a couple Niagara County restaurants. However, we wanted to leave it there…this means that The White Carrot, one of the best restaurants in a two hour radius of Buffalo, did not make the list.
Critical Praise: When coming up with seeding, we didn’t just take our opinion of the restaurant but we also also took into account ratings on websites like TripAdvisor and Yelp and also read through Andrew Galarneau’s reviews. We tried not to have our personal bias towards restaurants or chefs weigh into the seeding too much, but we are only human.
Overall Experience: Bonus points were added to restaurants that offer an all around great experience. Meaning if the food, atmosphere, wait staff and bar staff are all excellent.. the restaurant will be seeded higher.
Longevity: When it came down to seeding one restaurant over another, occasionally we took into account how long the restaurant has been open. While there are more exciting restaurants that have opened in the last three years, restaurants that have been popular for the last 15 years deserve some recognition.

Like always, these matches will take place on our twitter account in the form of daily polls. They will open at 8am-ish and close at 10pm ish.

Group A