From Brussels-sprout kimchi in Illinois to beef with parsnip milk in Oakland, the best of 2009 By RAYMOND SOKOLOV

The Year in Food
From Brussels-sprout kimchi in Illinois to beef with parsnip milk in Oakland, the best of 2009 By RAYMOND SOKOLOV

In a rough year for the economy, it's been a good year for food. Here are my picks for the sweetest spots in the 2009 foodie menu.

BEST NEW RESTAURANT
This is too big and various a nation to have a best of anything. So I've picked three standout new eateries, East, West and heartland.

East: A Voce Columbus
(10 Columbus Circle, New York, 212-823-2523, avocerestaurant.com)

Missy Robbins has brought the neo-Italian gospel from her last gig, at Chicago's Spiaggia, to the third-floor restaurant ghetto at the Time Warner Center. Sicily is a primary inspiration here: Pine nuts, raisins and citrus undergird graceful revisions of classics. But all of Italy contributes something—as does Ms. Robbins's imagination—to polenta punctuated by tiny black dots of ground buckwheat.

West: Commis

(3859 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, Calif., 510-653-3902,
commisrestaurant.com)

Oakland-born James Syhabout opened his own storefront place in his native city only four months before he got a Michelin star. Commis means apprentice, and Mr. Syhabout has worked for some of the best chefs in the Bay area and abroad, at places like Spain's El Bulli, the U.K.'s Fat Duck and Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif. In the process, he has honed a palatal gift that allows him to combine exotic ingredients seldom melded in one dish. Instead of steak sauce, your beef might come with pearl barley, parsnip milk and wild anise.

Heartland: June

(4450 N Prospect Rd., Peoria Heights, Ill., 309-682-5863
www.junerestaurant.com)

June graces a mini-mall in this no-frills river town, but the wide world echoes here, in an up-to-the-minute open kitchen. With produce provided by an 80-acre organic farm, the restaurant, under Josh Adams, improves on the locavore bounty, turning Brussels sprouts into kimchi and grinding its own duck sausage.

BEST NEW DISH
I watched Joël Robuchon fine-tune the dish of the year for the spring menu at his hyper-opulent Joël Robuchon in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas (3799 Las Vegas Blvd. S., 702-891-7925, www.mgmgrand.com). It was a dish layered with a crab mixture and strips of yellow-brown sea urchin, which the chef took from a neat pile. Minced, raw white cauliflower lurked within the crabmeat mix as a stealth carrier of a starch element that makes this dish a no-grain, marine cousin of tabbouleh, the ancient Near Eastern salad based on bulghur wheat and mint. Mr. Robuchon has moved on through several seasonal menus by now, but we won't soon forget this springtime caprice.

BEST EXOTIC NEW INGREDIENT
Pagliolaia, the dewlap or flap that hangs down from the jowls of the steer. We encountered it at Spiaggia (980 North Michigan Ave., Chicago, 312-280-2750, spiaggiarestaurant.com). Chef Tony Mantuano's idea of surf 'n turf is wood-roasted diver scallops with black trumpet mushrooms and crispy pagliolaia. The hearty beef fragments and earthy fungus highlight the slippery elegance of the seafood. Having dewlaps myself, I winced for a minute but surrendered to the brilliance of the conception and the resourcefulness of Spiaggia's butcher.

MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC FOOD ACTS
President Barack Obama invited Cuban-American New Jersey chef/restaurateur Maricel Presilla to oversee the food at a White House event celebrating Latino music. The menu included Argentinean beef empanadas with red chimichurri; Brazilian black-eyed pea arrumadinho, Honduran enchiladas with chicken hash; and Cuban roast pork and malanga (a tropical root vegetable) canapes with lulu sauce. This was a groundbreaking nod from the First Eater to the heritage food of Latino citizens.

Mr. Obama continued his foray into ethnogastropolitics by engaging New York-based, Ethiopian-Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson to cook the administration's first state dinner, an Indian-fusion meal for the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Old Washington hands muttered about the wisdom of serving a visiting envoy the food of his own country, but I'm guessing that not a word of complaint percolated inside the Beltway after guests tasted Mr. Samuelsson's vegetarian menu, which included roasted potato dumplings with tomato chutney, chickpeas and okra or green curry prawns, caramelized salsify with smoked collard greens and coconut-aged basmati rice.

WORST LUCK FOR A TOP CHEF
First, Anita Lo had to close her Greenwich Village Asian barbecue venue Bar Q, which she had opened just in time for the bursting of the financial bubble. Then, on July 5, she came to work at her very successful and universally admired Annisa, only to find it a charred disaster. Ms. Lo and her front-of-the-house partner Jennifer Scism spent months climbing out of the mess; a Building Department permit now graces the front door. Better luck in the New Year to Anita, Jennifer and everyone else who has fed us well or written to us with savvy tips for where to eat next.