As suspected, time and budget were factors that came into play in the revived Top 100 at the Chronicle, so it's less of a Top 100 restaurants ranking so much as a "Top 100 restaurants we've been to" list.

The reason Quince made the cut on the 2025 Top 100 at the Chronicle and Saison did not appears to be that critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan has been to Quince a couple of times in the last year, but she hasn't been to Saison. (She has not said as much, but we can read between lines about the more obvious snubs.)

Also left off the list because she couldn't get a reservation: Noodle in a Haystack.

Chung Fegan and Associate Critic Cesar Hernandez explain this in a piece posted Wednesday, after Tuesday's reveal of the top 50 of the completed Top 100. Chung Fegan says that she prioritized restaurants not recently reviewed by Chronicle critics — so, we can take that to mean that she trusted Soleil Ho's six-year-old pan of Chez Panisse and middling 2022 review of French Laundry, and skipped them.

"Like most Chronicle subscribers, budget is a factor for me as a critic as well. I do not have a limitless expense account, and each month I have to make hard choices about where and how to spend my budget," she says.

Also, Chung Fegan writes, "when it came time to make our final picks, we felt it was important to maintain a sense of balance so that the list didn’t end up as the Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area if Money Is No Object."

I understand that we all have deadlines in this business, self-imposed and otherwise. But my skepticism about how much to trust this Top 100 project seems justified. In her first full year on the job, Chung Fegan maybe shouldn't be expected to criss-cross the Bay Area and catch up on every Michelin three-star experience and every restaurant lauded by the national critics in the last few years. But there is some expectation, both from the restaurant community and from readers, that a Top 100 list has been carefully considered and vetted, and that omissions and additions aren't being made arbitrarily based on logistics.

Maybe they should have waited another year to revive this list until there was a broader lay of the land.

Instead, it becomes a "Top 100 restaurants we've been to in the last year," and that sort of list seems like it could veer wildly from one year to the next, with not only new openings to account for but also all the older, established restaurants the critics have finally gotten to visit jockeying for spots in the crowded ranking.

Taking on this list again and maintaining it will always be a bear. While Michael Bauer, who inaugurated the list three decades ago, claimed to revisit each of his 100 picks at least once during the year, to make sure that the quality of food and service was being maintained, we can't prove that he always did. But that is the kind of burden such a list inevitably entails when you're the paper of record, when the dining public comes to trust your taste, and when there is serious economic impact at stake for the restaurants themselves.

I'm not just whinging here about a best-of list and what I'd personally prefer to see on it. There is real potential benefit to landing on a list like this in a major paper, and some potential economic harm to being left off.

Sure, restaurants that already have their Michelin recognition will continue to benefit from the tourism and splurge-spenders that brings. But what of the mid-range restaurants in crowded categories, like Italian, French and "California," that are doing great work, balancing tight profit margins in a competitive restaurant economy like this one, and see themselves sidelined by a bagel shop, a taco truck, or a deli? What of the ambitious prix-fixe spots that have been so far snubbed by Michelin — I'm thinking immediately of spots like Anomaly and Nightbird — that wait for local critics to give them a boost on a list like this?

For them, this is more than just another list.

Previously: French Laundry, Saison, Chez Panisse All Snubbed on Chronicle's New Top 100

Photo via Saison/Instagram