Best cities for restaurants

Best cities and places for restaurants are:

New York: Chinatown and Little Italy still draw tourists, everywhere you will see ethnic pockets, and the city is astounding for its lively downtown restaurant rows like SoHo, TriBeCa, NoLita, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Tenth Avenue and the Meatpacking District.

Los Angeles: French food is close to dead in L.A. However, the city still has great sushi, the best new steakhouse in America — Wolfgang Puck’s CUT ($150) — and plenty of celeb hangouts where the food is excellent, like Ortolan ($140), whose co-owner and host is TV actress Jerri Ryan.

New Orleans: Still in recovery mode, the Crescent City’s restaurants are coming back strong and you can still get all the great dishes: the gumbos at the Gumbo Shop ($90), the bananas Foster at Brennan’s ($110), the shrimp rémoulade at Galatoire’s ($100), the café brûlot at Commander’s Palace ($110), the beignets at the Café du Monde, the muffuletta sandwiches at Central Grocery, and the Apalachicola oysters all over town.