When Blackbird was new, the rectangle of light that poured out of its glass facade at night was the only thing you could see in the darkness of West Randolph Street. You knew there had to be something interesting going on inside, and there was. Paul Kahan, in his first restaurant, was stripping down and rebuilding the farm-to-table style of restaurant made famous in California, putting in a Midwestern engine and giving it a styling that was more Bauhaus than Berkeley. Mr. Kahan’s kitchen had deep roots in the fields of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, but he didn’t leave the dirt on those roots. Like the rest of Blackbird, his plates were big-city sophisticated without being pretentious; next to his knives and steel he seemed to keep a finely tuned malarkey detector. Mr. Kahan and his partners went on to build restaurants — Avec, the Publican, Big Star and others — whose rooms were louder but more congenial and whose cooking was brawnier and more direct. But Blackbird was always where you went to see all the elements of a great restaurant in motion at once. Until the end, it was a beacon.

Soondubu jjigae — the hot Korean stew made with soft tofu — is part of a shared culinary lexicon in Los Angeles thanks to Monica Lee, the South Korean immigrant who opened Beverly Soon Tofu. Ms. Lee wanted her own community to feel at home, to feel restored by the comforting dish in her dining room, which she decorated with simple, glossy live-edge furniture. She also wanted to teach diners who might not be familiar with soon about its pleasures — the way it announced itself from halfway across the room, trailing an intensely reassuring steam, and arrived at the table expressive, bubbling, alive.

At first, her menu focused on nothing else, inviting diners to build their own bowls, to their own tastes, picking out broths, proteins and heat levels. “I noticed that Americans like to customize,” she said. “I saw the opportunity.” Over the decades, her soondubu jjigae fueled weekly family dinners and special birthday parties, nursed hangovers and heartbreaks, nourished workers on their way home and new parents on a night out. By the time the restaurant closed in September, Ms. Lee hadn’t just achieved her goal, she had expanded the definition of comfort food across the city, for generations of Angelenos.

This longtime diner — its name is pronounced LEE-keh LEE-keh, after the 19th-century Hawaiian princess whose daughter was the last heir to the stolen throne — opened with carhops and a neon sign promising saimin, a local soup of skinny noodles, ringlets of green onion and fish cakes with hot pink swirls. The carhops eventually disappeared, but little else changed. The owners, Alice and James Nako, second-generation Japanese with roots in Okinawa, passed the business on to their daughter, who then passed it on to her daughters, and people kept coming for the teriyaki burgers, Vienna sausages and lemon chiffon pie. The renowned Honolulu chef Mark Noguchi ate there his whole life. As a kid, he said, “It was an event.” On his last visit, just before the state locked down in March, he ordered his standby Green River lime soda and saimin — “the same bowl as it was when I was 8 years old.”

Lucky Strike was for us. That’s how it felt in the early 1990s, when I lived in downtown Manhattan and my restaurant priorities were cheap red wine, good lighting and a potent steak au poivre. Lucky Strike was Keith McNally’s first restaurant of his own, and a looser, more fun sibling of the polished, magnetic Odeon in TriBeCa, which he had opened with partners in 1980.

At the time, Lucky Strike’s location was most accurately described not as “in SoHo,” but “near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel,” and its strip of Grand Street was desolate at night. The warmth and noise that it spilled onto the street made it a beacon for locals. We liked that the food was never quite good enough to draw a crowd. We liked that the rough floors and wine tumblers repelled the people who came looking for lychee martinis and tuna tartare. Mr. McNally went on to open bigger, glossier joints that are still with us — like Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and Pastis — and has closed almost as many, but Lucky Strike was the only one that was a neighborhood restaurant, and the only one I’ll mourn.

In the early 2000s, Megan and Colby Garrelts (above) represented a burgeoning breed of culinary talent: young chefs who wanted to take what they’d learned working at high-profile restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to make a splash, and a life, in a smaller city. The result was Bluestem, an early-21st-century tasting menu restaurant with the heart of a welcoming bistro. Dinner in the elegant, 80-seat restaurant brought foie gras torchon and chocolate pudding cake on Bernardaud china — and the liberty to order a pale ale with it, if you so pleased.

The first thing customers noticed about Taco Stop in the winter was the rack of coats hanging out front, beneath a sign that read: “Are you cold? Take one. Do you want to help? Leave one.” The coat-donation charity was created by Taco Stop’s owner, Emilia Flores, a psychologist from Durango, Mexico, who opened the taqueria in a former gas station. To José R. Ralat, the taco editor for Texas Monthly, the coat swap embodied the spirit of a taqueria he regarded among the state’s finest for reasons that went beyond its first-rate barbacoa, carnitas and picadillo. “It had regulars from all walks of life, from construction workers to suits,” Mr. Ralat said. “It offered nutritional sustenance, but also life-affirming sustenance.”

Ms. Flores said her transition from psychology to the restaurant business was seamless, because both professions “are about nourishing people.” The purpose of the coat exchange, she said, was simple: “To make sure we remember in tough times that we need to take care of each other.”

“The story of Mission Chinese Food, which began five years ago in San Francisco, includes nearly every important trend in the last decade’s restaurant culture,” Michael Floreak wrote in The Boston Globe in December 2015, when Danny Bowien’s restaurant-that-was-a-food-truck-that-became-a-pop-up was already on its second location in New York.

Things only got more zeitgeisty from there, and not in a good way. There were specific accusations of physical abuse by kitchen staff, fuzzy allegations of sexual harassment and a web of crisscrossing attempts to shift the managerial blame. Yes, Mr. Bowien’s club-mix versions of Sichuan classics were undeniably powerful. Angela Dimayuga’s overhaul of the menu for its debut on Canal Street added fresh culinary influences and a welcome layer of sophisticated gloss. The downtown-dive atmosphere, dressed up enough to keep the designers and magazine editors from running away in fear, brought old-fashioned Warholian cool back to Manhattan, against the odds. But that’s all hard to remember now that the whole enterprise sounds as toxic as a Superfund site. The truth may never come out but by the end it was impossible to keep believing, as some people apparently did, that Mission Chinese was leading the way into a more enlightened future.

Chip and Sara Lim were just teenagers when the Khmer Rouge began its campaign of genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. They escaped to Northern California in 1982, where they eked out a living cleaning houses and restrooms at McDonald’s for a few years until, as newlyweds, they staked all their money on a strip-mall Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, which they rechristened Sunny Donuts. For them, the doughnut shop was a sanctuary, as it was for so many of their fellow refugees, who pooled hard-earned funds from family and friends to lease storefronts, and woke at dawn to slip plump rings of dough into deep-fryers. By the 1990s, Cambodian immigrants owned 2,400 doughnut shops across the state, about 80 percent of the market. The Lims made their doughnuts — buttermilk, blueberry, chocolate-glazed, piped with custard, oozing jam — from scratch and packed them in pink-striped boxes, earning enough to put their three children through college. When sales dropped during the pandemic, they decided to retire, to rest, for the first time in decades.

With a menu of dill-cured fish and reinvented cinnamon rolls, an in-house forager and a dedication to cold-weather crops like rye and rutabagas, Bachelor Farmer nailed three elements of current food culture: New Nordic cuisine, undersung American home cooking and hyperlocal ingredients. Largely because it was bankrolled by two scions of the Dayton family, the restaurant managed to be both a homage to the hardscrabble lives of Scandinavian immigrants and a luxurious hipster hangout, showered with stars and media coverage. Bachelor Farmer may have been the most hyped, most hygge restaurant in the Twin Cities, but by itself isn’t the greatest loss of 2020. The subsequent closings of Grand Cafe, In Bloom, Bellecour and the Butcher and the Boar have left the area gutted of the kind of big, ambitious places that power a restaurant ecosystem, attracting and supporting fishmongers and farmers, wine importers and bread bakers as well as skilled cooks and servers. The Twin Cities aren’t alone in that, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating.

When Andy Ricker began selling Thai food that he cooked on a grill behind a shed next to his house on Division Street, he liked to say that he had gone into the restaurant business to finance his backpacking trips to Thailand. But if you’re just trying to make a buck, why leave small, rock-hard black crabs in the papaya salad? Why insist that diners who asked for chopsticks eat sticky rice with their hands and noodles with a fork? Why load up the menu with livers and stomachs and blood? It was obvious that Mr. Ricker wanted to push things. He pushed and pushed, and built a restaurant company like no other, a four-city galaxy of Pok Poks, Whiskey Soda Lounges and other small and tightly focused establishments that somehow stayed true to the low-tech, ad-hoc spirit of the original shed. Then the galaxy began to collapse, star by star, until October, when Mr. Ricker turned out all the remaining lights, including those at the original Pok Pok. “Closed for good,” he wrote in an email from Thailand, where he lives now. “And it’s good to be closed.”

Rod Okuno started working at 20th Street Cafe as a child, in the late 1950s. He stopped last spring, when he and Karen, his wife and partner, decided to permanently close the downtown diner his grandparents, Harry and Tsugi, opened nearly 75 years ago, after their release from Camp Amache, a Japanese-American internment camp in southeast Colorado.

Until the end, Mr. Okuno, 68, woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get stock boiling before opening the restaurant’s doors at 6:30. He spent his days making pancakes and Denver omelets, chicken fried steaks and udon noodles with kamaboko. Many of his regulars also had decades-long relationships with the restaurant, which, for the past 20 years, was open only for breakfast and lunch. “It was a space for Japanese-Americans to get together,” said Erin Yoshimura, 58, who began eating at 20th Street Cafe as a toddler. Her grandparents ran a grocery in the same neighborhood. Her father, Rex, 85, discovered the cafe as a teenager, soon after his family moved to Denver, following their release from an internment camp in Arkansas.

Ms. Yoshimura insists that Mr. Okuno’s chicken fried steak was the best in Colorado. “Of course, you had to have it with rice, not mashed potatoes,” she said. “That’s what made it a real Japanese-American meal.”

When Farallon opened near Union Square, it was exactly the right restaurant at the right time. The first dot-com boom was about to peak, and the city was in the middle of what one might call its statement-restaurant phase, which began when Wolfgang Puck opened the dramatic see-and-be-seen Postrio in 1989. Farallon’s siblings included showstoppers like Nancy Oakes’s Boulevard (opened in 1993 and still going) and Traci Des Jardins’s Jardinière (opened in 1997 and closed in 2019).

Like those three restaurants, Farallon was designed and co-owned by Pat Kuleto, who was at the height of a career that would produce the look of almost 200 restaurants. With its sea-urchin chandeliers, jellyfish lamps and banquettes designed to look like clamshells, it guaranteed a whimsical, elegant and expensive night out for people newly flush with internet dollars. It also had an important culinary pedigree. The chef and co-owner was Mark Franz, who for a decade presided over the kitchen at Stars, the sexy, groundbreaking clubhouse for American regional cuisine that Jeremiah Tower opened in 1987. Along with the pastry chef Emily Luchetti, also from Stars, Mr. Franz helped define a comfortable new and elevated style of San Francisco dining.

New Orleans is filled with restaurants designed to capture business from tourists. Much rarer are restaurants like Li’l Dizzy’s, created to serve the residents of a single neighborhood, in its case the mainly residential, historically Black area called Treme. That the small corner cafe attracted diners from all over town was a credit to the quality of its Creole gumbo, fried chicken and red beans, and to the talent of its owner, Wayne Baquet. Mr. Baquet brought the Creole cooking of Black New Orleans to a wider audience with a series of restaurants he operated before retiring in 2004. He unretired a year later to open Li’l Dizzy’s. All of those restaurants owed a debt to Eddie’s, the restaurant run by Mr. Baquet’s father, Eddie Baquet Sr. Eddie’s was a modest place — the cash register was a cigar box — that, like Li’l Dizzy’s, became famous, particularly for its fried chicken.

Mr. Baquet and his siblings grew up in the back of Eddie’s. (One of them, Dean Baquet, is executive editor of The New York Times.) Wayne was the last Baquet family member in the restaurant business. His departure from Li’l Dizzy’s, which is up for sale, closes an important chapter in New Orleans restaurant history.

When this Caribbean restaurant opened, it could have been one more trend follower in fashion-conscious Miami, serving fusion food to the beautiful people until they moved on to the next new thing. Instead, it became a neighborhood institution, serving dishes like jerk tuna tetaki and teriyaki grouper until it closed in July, on its 21st anniversary.

Back in the 1990s, South Florida fusion was often a hackneyed cuisine born as frequently of marketing as of culinary inspiration. What separated Ortanique from those trafficking in Floribbean clichés? Partly it was the inspiration of the proprietors and life partners, Cindy Hutson, the chef, and Delius Shirley, (above) who ran the dining room. Ms. Hutson was not a trained chef. Her culinary schooling came from Mr. Shirley’s mother, Norma Shirley, a Jamaican chef once celebrated as “the Julia Child of the Caribbean.”

The pandemic hit Ortanique hard. Their landlord, the city of Coral Gables, would not budge on rent and the couple made the hard decision to close. “We watched people grow up here, little kids coming back years later with dates,” Ms. Hutson said. “Our regulars were older, and afraid to go out.

“Delius tried to negotiate, but they said, ‘We need rent by July 1,’” Ms. Hutson said. “I cried my eyes out. That was our baby.”

From the moment it opened, Vinland was more than a restaurant: it was a thought experiment. Influenced by chefs like Dan Barber and Rene Redzepi, the self-taught chef David Levi made a commitment to local ingredients that went much further than taking tomato salad off the menu. It meant cooking without sugar or black pepper or olive oil. It meant that one night’s menu might have three different dishes based on mushrooms, and woe to the diner who doesn’t care for fungi. (Reviews, not surprisingly, were mixed and passionate.)

So was Vinland a pretentious trend trap, or a good restaurant backed by good ideas about environmental, ecological, nutritional and ethical awareness? Looking back, the idea of running a restaurant with self-imposed rules, rather than imposed by public health and financial hardship, seems like an impossible luxury. To Mr. Levi, the fact that Vinland sustained itself financially while also paying decent wages, cooking only wild and organic ingredients meant it was an unqualified success. “We played by different rules,” he said.

Steven Friedman and Verna Wefald held their 1991 wedding reception at the Cliff House, so named for its dramatic perch above the Pacific Ocean. “I just remember looking at the ocean and thinking, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’” Mr. Friedman said. “You’re at the land’s end.”

The couple were just two of the many people who marked life events at the Cliff House, which dates to the Civil War era. In its early years, it catered to customers who arrived by carriage. Ownership changes, fires and evolving tastes altered its appearance over the decades. The restaurant, with its tall bank of windows offering panoramic views of Ocean Beach, was operated by the Hountlas family from 1973 until this year, when they announced that the restaurant would close permanently after failing to reach a lease agreement with the property’s current owner, the National Park Service.

Louis’, the waterfront diner nearby that was also operated by members of the Hountlas family and owned by the park service, closed in July. The dual closings ended, at least for the foreseeable future, a tradition of waterfront dining in the Bay Area that spans more than 160 years.

The Cliff House setting was particularly meaningful to Ms. Wefald, who grew up within walking distance of the restaurant. “For her, to have our reception there, it was kind of like a cycle-of-life loop,” Mr. Friedman said of Ms. Wefald, who died of cancer in 2010. “It was the perfect setting.”

Gee’s Garden drew its crowds on weekends, when a line of waiting diners would snake out the front door, an occurrence common enough to suggest that Tucson’s largest dim-sum parlor wasn’t quite big enough — even with a seating capacity in the hundreds. Its founders, Joan and Dudley Gee, converted the restaurant to dim sum in 1995, having opened it 20 years earlier, as one of southeast Arizona’s first Chinese buffets.

Eddie Lau, a former longtime employee, took over Gee’s in 2015. He credits a trio of experienced chefs — Tam Zihe, Fei Lee and Lei Panxai — for keeping the food quality high. “Our food was very very traditional, and we made it fresh,” Mr. Lau said. “People were willing to wait for it.”

Atlanta is a city that can be insecure about the quality of its restaurants, so it meant a lot when Staplehouse was named Bon Appétit’s restaurant of the year in 2016. Not only did the city have a restaurant and a chef (Ryan Smith) setting culinary trends instead of chasing them, but Staplehouse offered something else novel: a business structure that made the restaurant a for-profit subsidiary of the Giving Kitchen, a nonprofit organization helping restaurant workers facing unanticipated hardships.

After serving some relief meals for unemployed restaurant workers and trying takeout service, the restaurant closed for good in August, and the Giving Kitchen spun off into an independent entity. Mr. Smith and his wife, Kara Hidinger, bought the historic brick storefront that housed the restaurant and in October opened the Staplehouse Market in the same historic brick building in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, selling bottles of wine, homemade Funyuns, fermented hot sauce and dishes like brisket and tortillas to go. “It allowed us the ability to strip off the expectation and the brand of being precious and unattainable, and reintegrate into the neighborhood,” Ms. Hidinger said.

By now, Pegu Club on Houston Street in Manhattan is the subject of at least as many myths as the original Pegu Club on Cheape Road in colonial Rangoon. Did Audrey Saunders, an owner and the presiding mixological force, ban vodka from the premises? No, although she didn’t exactly welcome it with open arms, either. Was Pegu the first bar to insist on big, clunky ice cubes kept well below the freezing point? No, but it’s where scores of people got their first look at ice like that. Was every major bartender now at work in New York wielding a muddler at Pegu on opening night? Again, no, but within the first year or so. ... The point is that everybody who thinks they know something about the invention of the contemporary New York school of bartending — historically minded, technically fastidious, bitters-drenched, vermouth-worshiping — understands that Pegu is one of the main rooms where it all happened. That none of them can agree on exactly what did happen may be a sign of how good the drinks were.

This landmark was originally a neighborhood hangout for Benjamin Franklin and other founding fathers. In the modern era it drew visitors, usually tourists, seeking a taste of the 18th century. It managed to recreate the Colonial experience without the kitsch; for that it will be missed. Several years ago, dining by candlelight with our teenage granddaughters, my husband and I were impressed by mushroom toast, cornmeal fried oysters, turkey potpie, roast duck and the pepperpot stew for which City Tavern was known. Walter Staib, the chef who ran it for 26 years for the National Park Service (the division of the Department of the Interior that owns it) did his homework, even avoiding canned or frozen ingredients. In early November, the three-story brick-walled tavern, which had been damaged by fire in 1834, then demolished and rebuilt in 1976 for the nation’s bicentennial, fell victim to the pandemic. The essential tourism had vanished. “I went from being open every day with 85 employees down to 18 people four days a week,” said Mr. Staib, who is 74 and doesn’t plan to renew his contract if the tavern reopens.

When Johnny’s Half Shell opened its original location in Dupont Circle, it might as well have been an alien dropped into the middle of a city dominated by faceless expense-account restaurants. By and large, Washington dining hadn’t yet caught up with the regional American revolution happening in Los Angeles, New York and a handful of other cities.

Ann Cashion, the Mississippi-bred chef who had made her name in Washington when she opened Cashion’s Eat Place four years earlier, teamed up with the front-of-the-house man John Fulchino to create the city’s first restaurant dedicated to the bounty of the Mid-Atlantic States (with a little Gulf Coast love thrown in). Johnny’s was the kind of place that was the perfect antidote to government work. It keyed into memories of meals at the shore and long, unhurried nights at a great bar. When the shutdown happened, they closed the doors and never reopened.

“The pivot everyone was expected to make to carry out and delivery didn’t really apply,” Ms. Cashion said. “Johnny’s is a place, you know? The more we thought about it, the more we thought that a high-end seafood restaurant in the old-school manner was going to be too expensive to operate post-Covid.”

Whenever I visit an American city for longer than one night, I find myself searching for a restaurant like Lilly’s — one with deep local roots, serving a regional variant of cultivated comfort food.

The chef and co-owner, Kathy Cary, all but invented the modern notion of what local flavor means in Louisville. She was a champion of local farmers well before that was a widespread practice, particularly between the coasts. She embraced the now-common idea that Southern cuisine and French cuisine — fried sweetbreads in red-eye gravy, for instance — could coexist on the same plate.

Ms. Cary, who announced her retirement in June, at age 66, was gracious to customers as well as potential competitors. “When I arrived in Louisville 19 years ago and didn’t know a soul, she was one of the first people to walk through my restaurant doors and offer me a warm welcome,” said Edward Lee, a prominent chef and restaurateur, and a lover of Ms. Cary’s chicken potpie. “Louisville feels a little emptier without Lilly’s.”

Going to the Jazz Standard on Mondays to hear the Mingus Big Band was like going to the New York City Ballet any time Balanchine is on the program — you were experiencing the works of a great 20th-century master performed by the company that knows those works best. The big difference is that you can’t eat barbecue potato chips, smoked sausage and pit beans at the ballet. But Danny Meyer’s jazz club always combined a cultural mission with a culinary one, as did his restaurant upstairs, Blue Smoke. No book, documentary or television series did as much for New York’s understanding of barbecue. When it opened, it introduced the notion of regional smoked-meat styles to a city where many residents still thought barbecued and grilled were synonymous.The barbecue wasn’t very good at first, but as it improved, diners came to see that St. Louis spareribs, Texas beef ribs and Carolina pulled pork were not simply hunks of oven-baked meat painted with the same sweet sauce.

Occupying a Craftsman bungalow in the Wallingford neighborhood, Tilth felt as much like the home of its chef and owner, Maria Hines, as it did a restaurant. Eating there was personal. The chef’s passion for local and organic ingredients was expressed in dishes that popped with color and flavor. A meal in the late 2000s included wild sockeye salmon with foraged mushrooms, and a vegetarian cassoulet. It tasted like the Pacific Northwest, condensed into a meal for two, with a memorable cardamom-and-bourbon spiked hot chocolate for dessert.

Picture Bakersfield a century ago — the chaos of the train station, the boardinghouses around it bustling with workers, the communal tables at Noriega’s packed with Basque men feasting in shifts on beans and pickled tongue, before taking a room upstairs for the night. Even as the city changed, and its center shifted away from the train, and Noriega’s allure faded, it remained an anchor for the American Basque diaspora, with affordable family-style meals that referenced the appetites and tastes of sheepherders who ate there nearly a hundred years ago.

The pandemic made Noriega’s a relic — its green sign now sits in the Kern County Museum — though the name was bought by a new owner, who plans to open something called Noriega’s on Stockdale Highway, far from the train station and the old heart of Bakersfield.

In the last 50 years, no restaurant had a greater impact on New Orleans culinary culture than K-Paul’s. Opened on a then-sleepy stretch in the French Quarter, the restaurant is where the chef Paul Prudhomme (above), its co-founder, fused the cooking of rural Acadiana, where he was born, with the urban sensibility of New Orleans. K-Paul’s is also where Mr. Prudhomme created the model for the media-savvy, entrepreneurial restaurant chef, an example that altered the course of his profession, sparked national interest in American regional cuisine, and helped make New Orleans synonymous with great food.

On its way to becoming a cliché, K-Paul’s most famous entree, blackened redfish, awakened many Americans to the virtues of spices — and, at the height of the dish’s popularity, in the 1980s, threatened the redfish population in the Gulf of Mexico. But the unabashedly casual restaurant had a deep menu; the chicken-Andouille gumbo, shrimp-packed jambalaya and stuffed pork chops were all excellent.

Mr. Prudhomme never attempted to duplicate K-Paul’s through expansion. It remained his only restaurant when he died, in 2015. He left K-Paul’s — along with strict instructions to never sell the name — to his niece Brenda Prudhomme and her husband, Paul Miller, who was the longtime executive chef. “Paul didn’t trust anyone else to run K-Paul’s,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s history.”