And the lists just keep coming!

Food mag Bon Appetit has assembled a short list of their ‘Best Foods of The Year’ to round out 2009. A few of their faves: top dish – meatballs (if you’re ever in Seattle, make sure you stop in at Spring Hill for their heavenly Monday night meatballs), cuisine of the year – Austrian, ingredient of the year – Sriracha hot sauce. And food allergy activists take note! They’ve curiously picked gluten-free pasta as the ‘health food of the year’.

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Australian restaurant reviewer Pat Nourse has also assembled a great list to round out the year, naming his top ten restaurant dishes of 2009. While most of the dining spots making the list are located down under, naturally, Nourse makes sure to include his top picks around the world, including Chicago’s Alinea, London’s Bocca di Lupo, and Portugal’s Gambrinus.

And don’t think his list of favorites is all fluff.

7. L’Arpège’s turbot
Pretty much everything else about this meal sucked – from the uninterested service, the bad seats and the weak food, it was the very picture of a cliché of a disappointing and woundingly expensive Paris three-star meal, made all the worse for high and long-harboured expectations. This glimmer of how good things could actually be almost made it worse: a slice cut from this king of fishes, gently roasted whole on the bone over the course of the dinner service, with the subtlest of subtle green-tea sauces underscoring the flavour of the flesh.

~Jennifer Heigl