California Dominates Yelp's List Of The Top Restaurants To Visit In 2024

At the beginning of each year, the food industry tends to look back on the one that came before, crunching the numbers to find out what foods were trendiest and which restaurants did the most business. There's also plenty of speculation about what will be popular in the coming year, and Yelp joined in the fun by creating a list of top restaurants for 2024.

Although the site claims that these restaurants have been users' favorites during the current year, two weeks' worth of dining data doesn't seem like much to go on. If that is the case, however, then it's no surprise that the state hosting five out of the list's top 10 restaurants is California — many areas throughout the rest of the nation are dealing with severe cold and winter storms that may be impacting people's ability to dine out.

Even if the picks are based on 2023 popularity, California still has a major leg up because it has the most restaurants of any state — 68,189 at last count, per market research firm Data Axle USA. This is an increase of more than 50% over second-place Texas, which trails behind at 44,177. The Lone Star State did, however, manage to get one restaurant in Yelp's top 10. Other states featured on the list were Arizona, Missouri, Florida, and Hawaii, all but one of which are warm-weather states.

There's no doubt that all of the restaurants on Yelp's list are popular with diners and are probably worth checking out if you're in a nearby region of California (and nice to daydream about if you're stuck elsewhere staring at a landscape of snow and ice). Of the five California restaurants on the list, two are in the Los Angeles area: GS Cafe and Ethiopian Cuisine in Covina is, as the name indicates, an Ethiopian restaurant that took the No. 4 spot, while Broken Mouth, which took the No. 6 spot, is a Korean-Hawaiian restaurant in Los Angeles proper. Uncle Af's, a sandwich shop in Agoura Hills, came in at No. 10 on a list of 100, so it's still in the 90^th percentile.

Outside of Los Angeles and its immediate surroundings, Sunny Side Kitchen in Escondido came in at No. 3, which made it the highest-ranking of all the California restaurants. (Arizona and Missouri held down the list's top spots.) Sunny Side Kitchen's offerings can perhaps be best described as hipster comfort food: sourdough avocado breakfast sandwiches, meatloaf paninis, etc. Sierra Subs and Salads in Three Rivers also ventures into trendy food territory with such menu items as a wasabi chicken sandwich and chipotle persimmon soup.