Kana and I have been dating for nearly 5 years, and rarely does a month go by where we aren’t, in a general sense, trying something new. One of the first things we bonded over was our love for food (I may have promised very early on to make her breakfast every morning which I have absolutely for sure definitely followed through on). Both of us are very adventurous and love trying new foods or seeking out new restaurants. We noticed when we moved to London that one of the best ways to explore a city is through its restaurant scene. We’ve been through our fair share of duds, but we found once we started comparing restaurants that we had a lot of great memories for so many more.

Last year we took a trip to NYC and had an incredible night at the Michelin Star restaurant, Contra. Never had we been to a place that was so satisfying in almost every aspect imaginable when dining at a restaurant. Service, atmosphere, quality and quantity of food were all stellar; easily one of our most impressive dining experiences. Being a Michelin Star restaurant we expected as much but we were still so happy with our experience that we couldn’t stop talking about it long after we walked out the doors and explored the streets of the Lower East Side.

The only downfall either of us saw with our otherwise incredible experience was the cost, $429 for two carte blanch menus* and a cocktail each. We know – Michelin Star restaurant + big tourist city + higher quality food = higher cost. We get that. That doesn’t take away from the fact that we spent nearly as much as our monthly grocery bill on one 2.5-hour experience. We don’t eat at places of this quality or cost often (well…ever) so we had no issue with paying for it on this special occasion. I feel like it was worth it. But I also feel like it’s an incredibly difficult task for me to justify spending over $400 on a meal for 2 people.

As we continued to walk the humid, musky streets surrounding the restaurant that evening we started to have a conversation about where Contra stood in our pantheon of great restaurants. We went back and forth on many of the things I have already listed like the quality of service, music choice, cocktail variety, the speed at which we got our food and of course the quality of the food. We began comparing restaurants we had been to in the past and how well they held up. This conversation ended up becoming a regular part of our routine when we got back home and continued exploring restaurants & bars around London.

Fast forward a few months, and a few dozen new restaurant experiences later, I decided to put our now post-dinner-date ritual to paper. Well, virtual paper. I put it on a spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets. But that’s for another post. This started out relatively simple, with me attempting to recall all of the restaurants we have been to in the past 4ish years and very roughly rank them. I then showed Kana and she was able to add more, adjusting and at times ridiculing my ranking decisions.

But this quickly became a combined effort and something we continued to iterate on every few weeks. Now we have a monthly routine where we sit down for 20-30 minutes, go through this month’s new additions, and plop them into our list of over 100 restaurants that we have been to. Every time we sat down we adjusted an old restaurant as we added more, giving more context to others, adding in locations, dates, cost, whether we would return or not, and a section for notes where we added tidbits of our personal experience there. When we go to add in a new restaurant we typically have a general idea of where to plop it in, but to fine-tune it we compare it to a couple of other restaurants and play a game of “would you rather”.

Now, I’m sharing the actual spreadsheet largely because I’m very proud of how it has developed and how it currently looks. But also because this routine we now have has become one of the many small things Kana and I do together that add up to something greater. What I mean by this is that we have multiple ways of “checking in” with each other. Our communication is one of the things I am most proud of in our relationship. It’s something we work on all the time and probably has roots in our beginnings as a long-distance couple.

Over the years it has continued to get better through small habits and conscious work. Most of the time it’s very low-effort things like going for a walk with Pebble and talking about our day with each other, or watching Couples Therapy on Netflix together and reflecting on any similarities we see in ourselves. Other times it takes a little more effort like spending 20 minutes having healthy debate and back-and-forth over our ranking of restaurants. But having all of these things in our arsenal allows us ample opportunity to open up and talk about anything that is bothering us. Which, I can confidently say, is one of the pillars of our relationship: healthy communication.

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Restaurant Tier List

Okay Okay. I’ve rambled on and done my best to justify why a spreadsheet I made with 9 columns of categories to rank a restaurant we have (most often) only been to once is the primary reason why we are still together after 4 years.

Soooo…..

This is broken down into tiers, with the big pieces of criteria we use to separate the tiers being: Atmosphere, Service, and Food. The restaurants within the top tier, the ones we consider the best all-round, all exceeded our expectations in those 3 categories. The ones in A-tier have at least 2 of the 3 at a high quality. And so on for the lower tiers. There’s still more nuance to that but that’s the gist. Plus it looks pretty broken down into colours.

We started out by simply ranking them 1-100, with only a couple of columns (I think notes and “would we return” were some of the first). As we continued to expand the list by recalling past restaurants we realized that a straight-up ranking of 1-100 doesn’t really do what we want. I had seen tier lists made all the time in video game-related discussions and decided to try it out. Kana agreed that it worked well and allowed us to give a little more nuance to our ranking while also giving it a much-needed facelift/visual appeal.

Each time we sit down to update this list inevitably brings more improvements. It’s an iterative process and one that I enjoy each time. When we add a new restaurant it gives more context to the others and allows us to go back and update older rankings. Obviously, I’m nerding out about this and could go all out about the finer details but I assume most people are like Kana and don’t give a shit as long as it looks OK and functions. I guarantee we have lots of hot takes in our rankings and would love to hear some justification for why one place should be higher than another. My hope is that other people can make use of this, whether it be for personal use or as a couple. I find it to be a fun, small activity that we do that adds to our story.