For our Year in Review issue, food writer Mike Sula compiled a list of 2011’s best restaurants, along with the help of his state-of-the-art, myriad-data-crunching software program CriticKiller2012. They also threw in an impressively wide-ranging list of 133 tasty things the human half of the duo had eaten and drunk over the year. I don’t get around as much—I’m just the restaurants editor—but I did have some notable potables and bites. Here’s a modest list of them, in chronological order.

(1) In the cold of January I schlepped out to John Des Rosiers‘ Lake Bluff restaurant Inovasi, where among the highlights were steamed Manila clams and a salad of arugula and red oak lettuce with house-made bacon.Yet the tastiest, most memorable thing I had there was the “inovaccia”, cappuccino capped with thick goat’s milk froth. And that’s not a diss.