Sara Deseran and Jessica Battilana

Everything Pat Kuleto does, he does in a big way. Both seafood-forward Waterbar and its turf equivilant, Epic Roasthouse, are no exception—it’s just that Waterbar is the more talented of the two. Only Pat Kuleto would spend years and millions building a from-the-ground-up water-front restaurant with 18-foot-tall saltwater fish tanks and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Bay, with a pricey menu to match. Thankfully, ambition and execution are, in this case, well-matched.

Since the day it docked on Pier 1 1/2 like a Peruvian-flagged QE2, La Mar has been pretty much booked solid. This success story—the fifth of its kind in Lima-based celebrity chef Gaston Acurio’s empire—bucks many a trend: San Franciscans love their cozy neighborhood spots, but La Mar is located in an echoing historic building and has 180 seats. We value local chefs, but La Mar is unabashedly an import. We worship Italian, but La Mar offers not a strand of pasta.

If SF were a betting town, we’d go ahead and call Zaré at Fly Trap the dark horse. Though chef-owner Hoss Zaré isn’t an unknown (he previously owned three restaurants, including two in SF and one in  Napa), he’d disappeared from the scene for a spell. But this year he returned,  resurrecting a classic best known for its Hangtown Fry and calf’s liver—a tall order. We might miss the former Fly Trap had Zaré not done such a good job with the transformation. Though the interior remains largely unchanged, the menu received a complete overhaul.

Take a little East Coast formal (a GM in a suit and a chef who likes her vegetables brunoised) and West Coast casual (painted plywood floors, hawsers strung from the ceiling and diners in jeans) and you’ve got Anchor & Hope’s cross-country take on a seafood shack. The third SoMa project brought to us by Doug Washington, with chefs Steven and Mitchell Rosenthal of Town Hall and Salt House, features chef Sarah Schafer’s food, which is by no means shack-esque.

Every year, one restaurant becomes to the go-to spot for a night out, and 2008 brought Beretta: It offers cocktails concocted by some of the city’s best bartenders and an Italian menu, both in a hip, dimly lit, wood-floored restaurant in the middle of the Mission District that’s—drum roll—open until 1 a.m. The pizzas are solid, but it’s simple antipasti that ring true, including charred radicchio drizzled with saba, restrained bruschette and eggplant caponatina.