The 44 best restaurants in America

With new restaurants opening left and right, it can be hard to break through the noise and find the ones that are truly the best of the best.

We combined five noteworthy lists compiled by food critics, experts, and diners to come up with a definitive ranking of the best restaurants in the country.

We gave each restaurant a numerical rating based on how many lists the restaurant appeared on and how high it appeared on lists that were ranked. Restaurants that appeared on multiple lists ranked higher on our list, while restaurants that ranked on only one of these lists ended up closer to the bottom.

The lists we used were The Daily Meal's 101 Best Restaurants in America 2015, OpenTable's 2015 Top 100 Hot Spot Restaurants in America, The World's 50 Best Restaurants, the James Beard Foundation's 2015 Restaurant and Chef Award Semifinalists, and TripAdvisor's Travelers' Favorite Fine Dining Restaurants. You can read our complete methodology and see numerical scores here.