Restaurant Hospitality's top 20 galleries of 2021

This year, Restaurant Hospitality's New on the Menu featured plant-based meat substitutes, salmon tartare gougères, a $54 gyro, an oyster pie and more. 

Every year, the editorial team at Restaurant Hospitality looks for the best sandwiches across America. We look for innovation and great flavors. And we look for themes that indicate trends in sandwich making.

The Restaurant Hospitality Best Sandwich Contest received nearly 200 submissions this year from independent restaurants across the country. Based on the sandwiches these operators were eager to show off, Americans are looking beyond the classics for new flavors, or more “sandwich-ification” of traditional entrees.

In other news, thousands of restaurants were approved for grants from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund and never received a penny. Here are some of their stories.

When the U.S. Small Business Administration created the rules for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, passed by Congress this spring, it was supposed to be a smoother and easier process than the earlier Paycheck Protection Programs. Without banks as middlemen and with a prioritization period that would help women and minority-owned businesses get a fair shot (many of whom had been locked out of the PPP), the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund was designed to help uplift the struggling mom and pop restaurants.

Restaurant Hospitality received dozens of emails from restaurant owners detailing experiences of how they had been relying on these promised funds to keep their business afloat.

Click through the gallery to see which other stories made it on Restaurant Hospitality's top 20 galleries of 2021.