It’s everyone’s favorite time of year – wrapped season! This year we traveled from east coast to west coast in search of the best food we could find. Some people travel for sightseeing and tourism, others for relaxation and rejuvenation, and even others to visit family and friends. We travel strictly with one goal: go out to eat as much as possible. Being the restaurant and data-loving girlies we are, we aggregated our spending over the past year to analyze our food trends, and maybe to take a bit of a walk down memory lane. With that, we introduce our 2023 Restaurants Wrapped: a look into our times spent together dining out.

With that, let’s get into the numbers. Of the eight major cities we wined and dined in this year together, our top five cities ranked on food spending were as follows: Minneapolis, Boston, Charleston, Las Vegas, and New York. Minneapolis makes sense as we’re here majority of the year, but the more concerning note was that the spending in Boston wasn’t that far behind, despite being a four-day trip. To be fair, this was our golden friendiversary in a city known for its seafood and oysters, our favorite, so we had to do it large. Boston introduced us to our most expensive meal to date, and to one of our favorite restaurants. In Charleston we had our infamous oyster tour where we consumed an ungodly number of oysters, which ended on a rough note after some bad happy hour oysters. In Las Vegas we met our favorite restaurant of the year, although we would be remiss to not mention how stellar nearly every restaurant was. Finally, in New York we had a great time with friends and going to private karaoke rooms in Koreatown.

Not clickbait we spent $17,642 on food and drinks this year 🤫 Our top restaurants are listed based on spend, with oddly one from each of our top cities. Shoutout Demi located in our home city of Minneapolis for making the cut. While we enjoyed all of these restaurants, only Wing Lei made it to our favorite restaurants of the year. With that, let’s dive into our favorite restaurants and items.

Before discussing our favorite restaurants and items, there were a couple themes from 2023 for us. Number one, this year was a year for duck. Everywhere we went, if there was duck on the menu, we were ordering it. Some of our other top hits this year were oysters, obviously, pork belly, and a jammy egg. These items were consumed nearly every time we ate out.

Starting with our number one restaurant of the year: Wing Lei. The experience was absolutely divine, the aesthetic was beautiful, gold, and ornate, the drinks were superb and unique, and the hospitality and service were incredible – they even gave us a mini chair for our purse! Fitting in with the duck theme, we ordered the Peking duck tasting menu and can’t recommend it enough. You are walked through numerous courses that each use part of the duck until you finish the whole duck. Our next two favorite restaurants, Neptune Oyster and Petite Leon, we discovered from the New York Times’ top 50 restaurants of 2022, and they were onto something. If you find yourself in Boston, Neptune Oyster is certainly worth a 90-minute wait outside in the cold like we did. As for Petite Leon, we highly recommend sitting at the bar.

Our final favorite restaurants are two Minneapolis local favorites, Young Joni and Gai Noi. Be sure not to sleep on Young Joni’s brunch, which serves our most craved and raved item of the year, the Juk. As for Gai Noi, the rooftop is worth the wait for the vibes alone. Gai Noi is also one of the more affordable restaurants from our recommendations if you’re on a budget.

We’ve also highlighted our top five most memorable dishes we experienced this year. In order to make the cut, we found ourselves literally DREAMING about these items and when we’d be able to have them again. If you find yourself at any of those restaurants, it is a requirement to get the item listed. I also want to call out, the pork belly at Luna and the Bear was one of the first items we got comped for starting this blog, and we would pay double for this dish. This plate alone is worth the stop at this newer Minneapolis restaurant.

For us, 2023 was the year of trying new foods and new locations. We tried over 60 new restaurants together – that’s more than one new restaurant a week! I was shocked to find out that we only returned to three restaurants: Petite Leon, Khâluna, and Gai Noi. Of course, this analysis only looks at the restaurants we visited together. If we were to look individually at our top frequented restaurants, I have no doubt the most visited would be specifically Uber Eats orders from Sushi Train.

Looking forward to 2024, we have a couple goals with our dining habits.

1. Reign it in. We don’t always need to be going to the fanciest of places to enjoy ourselves. We’d love to discover more underground hole-in-the-wall local spots.
2. Become a regular. Our favorite part of the dining experience is chatting with the servers, so why not focus on building a relationship and rapport?
3. Post blogs on time. We want to have more accurate reflections of each restaurant and food item and share all our new restaurants and newfound favorites for you to try.

We strongly recommend that you do NOT do a restaurants wrapped on your own, as it is quite alarming to see how much you spend on going out to eat. We have always been saying that you have more money to spend if you don’t budget, and we want to keep it that way to live in peaceful bliss and ignorance. Cheers to a great 2023, and we’ll continue to update you all on our food adventures in the next season.