<p>I had a great meal at Zinc a couple of years ago. High end nouvelle Americaine.</p>
<p>Pepe’s is the greatest pizza anywhere. We go out of our way and waste hours to eat it any chance we get. I don’t know why none of the hundreds of other pizza places I’ve tried comes close, but they don’t. If barrons knows of dozens of others as good, please share. In Philadelphia – which does not suffer for lack of good Italian food generally – I would settle for one place 50% as good. And, yes, Libby’s next door has great Italian pastries.</p>
<p>We have a longstanding emotional attachment to Claire’s Cornercopia, a vegetarian restaurant just across Chapel from the Old Campus. My wife was employee #1 when Claire bought Karmel Korner, which was essentially a head shop, and started baking muffins to sell there, and she still gets acknowledged in the cookbooks. The food is pretty good, too, but not elegant at all. We go there whenever Pepe’s is closed. (But I can’t imagine that it’s the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the country, since I’m pretty sure Moosewood in Ithaca was open before 1975. Heck, there are certainly decades-old kosher dairy restaurants on the Lower East Side in New York that could qualify as vegetarian.)</p>