Screen Recording 2026-04-09 at 9.52.25 PM.mov
Overview
Top 100 Restaurants is a yearly list compiled by San Francisco Chronicle food critics on the best places to eat at in the Bay Area. It was paused due to COVID-19, but we decided to bring it back in 2025. It’s one of our biggest projects of the year and we partnered with VISA and OpenTable for the newest iterations.
Team
Timeline
Role
Multiple teams including design, food, photo, audience, engineering, and marketing
January - March 2025 & January - March 2026
[design and development only]
Design, Front-end Development
The New York Times has done it. Los Angeles Times has done it. San Francisco Chronicle has also done it. And it’s always the same format: a polished list with ultra-high quality photos.
However, food is one of the most widely-read sections from the Chronicle and restaurant recommendation lists tend to have particularly high readership.
So how can we create a less repetitive restaurant list experience that maintains reader interest and sets us apart from other organizations that produce food content?
Constraints
Since we are bringing back this list after almost five years, we could not rely on past metrics and user research. Because the Top 100 list is kept a secret [🤫 it’s even kept secret from most of the newsroom] and done on a tight deadline, we also had limited opportunities for user testing during the first published iteration of the project.
Getting the ball rolling
To circumnavigate the constraint of not having enough user research, we analyzed lists other organizations have created instead. People from across several teams synthesized what features they liked and disliked from each of these lists to come up with our own list of features.
Features planning