Our 2018 Restaurant Awards capture the year when the scales tipped, when the cosmic balance changed. This is the year that local restaurants snatched the Promethean flame from Las Vegas Boulevard.

Our annual celebration of Las Vegas’ best dining spots, dishes, and chefs

As you dig in to our annual honor roll of the valley's best chefs and restaurants this year, you'll come across the words revolution, revolutionize and revolutionare a lot.

More dishes and dining trends of 2015 that our critics savored.

Desert Companion’s 19th Annual Restaurant Awards

2014 was an anxious year for foodies — but a good kind of anxious. The kind of anxious that comes from maintaining a feverish, nearly athletic dining schedule to try to keep up with all the new restaurants that opened this year.

The Forager at Five50 Pizza Bar

Where I eat “With three kids, we mostly eat in the neighborhood and of the moment. Being spontaneous seems to be our best bet.

Surprise of the Year Yonaka. Brilliant new Japanese cuisine is popping up all over the dining scene, but no one expected a former French café at Flamingo and Decatur to emerge as a palace of future-sushi, a thoughtfully experimental kitchen where any fresh, bright ingredient you can think of — and many you can’t — find their perfect place on a plate with raw fish.

The post-bubble economy may have inspired a new embrace of comfort food and casual fare but, thankfully, some chefs realized that not all of us need a celebrity-branded gourmet burger to heal our souls. Come on: Thrill us! They did.