Downtowners love to make fun of restaurants on the UWS. But there are plenty of good places to eat. Some were mentioned above but the list should also include Gennaro for extremely good unpretentious Italian, Ouest and lots of cheap ethnic places. I don't think it is fair to include the Lincoln Center area restaurants which are bastions of mediocrity as most of the diners there are just on their way to see an opera and are not locals. For a range of reasons (mostly due to the cost of real estate), there are not as many high end restaurants on the Upper West Side as there are downtown. But the percentage of good restaurants out of the population is not embarassing and not a wasteland.