Are these really the world's best 50 restaurants?
The annual list of the planet's finest eateries doesn't tell the full story about high-end dining - or what makes great food memorable. Plus: what I've been drinking this week
The annual publication of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list fascinates and irritates foodies in equal measure. The 2024 edition, published earlier this month, is certainly a dazzling parade of culinary excellence.
This is a more international list than it was ten years ago. Paris and Bangkok lead with four restaurants each. Spain has the most top-50 restaurants of any country, with five, including the top spot, Barcelona’s Disfrutar, but there are strong showings from Mexico City, Lima and Tokyo at three apiece. London has just two restaurants in the top 50 – Kol (one Michelin star, British-sourced Mexican) and Ikoyi (two stars, West African).
But what does it really show? Published since 2002 by British magazine publisher William Reed, it’s ultimately just a posh listicle – and a giant marketing exercise, currently sponsored by San Pellegrino water. Nor is there anything very scientific about it: the list simply reflects an annual poll of over 1,000 food “experts”.
That’s before you get to the ethics and politics of fine dining accessible only to the wealthy. For example, the tasting menu with matching wines at three-Michelin-star Disfrutar costs €460 (£389) a head.
In a sense you have to marvel at late capitalism’s ability to assemble such extraordinary creations as suckling pig with steamed carrot dim sum and bull tail noodle soup (DiverXO, Madrid, fourth on the list); or blue lobster, artichoke, lardo, citrus-leaves oil and myoga (Frantzén, Stockholm, 35th); or pickled sardine with raw foie gras and brioche (Oteque, Rio de Janeiro, 37th). These are dining experiences that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.
They demand choreography of complex international supply chains (regardless of most high-end restaurants’ commitment to local sourcing) and, in most cities, the marshalling of a labour force drawn from across the world. Much is the kind of highly innovative but labour-intensive cuisine pioneered by Catalan chef Ferran Adriá at the legendary Ell Bulli restaurant from the early 1990s (it closed in 2011.)
El Bulli, which topped the World’s 50 Best five times, leaned heavily on the system of stages, unpaid internships normally lasting three months. Likewise René Redzepi’s Noma, in Copenhagen, the only other five-times winner, relies on this unpaid labour, with up to 20 stagiaires working alongside 30-odd paid chefs (Noma closes permanently at the end of this year.)
Such practices in top restaurants often entail exploitation. Imogen West-Knight’s brilliant FT magazine piece a couple of years ago laid bare the relentless slog and bullying behind the astonishing plates at many star Copenhagen establishments. One Noma ex-stagiaire told her: “[the restaurant might] put them on picking herbs for three months. They don’t get the experience they were promised, but who cares? Because Noma got their work done.” Nevertheless, dozens of ex-Noma and El Bulli stagiaires have since gone on to prominent culinary careers.
Aside from the underside of such fine dining, however, I wonder how often such meals are quite as memorable or revelatory as their chefs bill them to be. Maybe it’s just middle age, but personally I’m conscious of having grown more impatient over the years with just what a production a meal at such establishments can often be. Why does this fish need such a complicated emulsion and garnish? Must I really eat that crispy pork “snack” in one bite as instructed?
More than that, eating is a social activity: how memorable meals are usually depends in part on who you ate them with and when. A roadside bistro lunch in Vacqueyras more than 20 years ago sticks in my mind, punctuating a blissful day wine tasting with old friends; or dinner by a beach in Crete with my wife, eating snails as the sun sank; or amazing sea urchins and other seafood at a small restaurant by the sea on the island of Elba. None would have claimed to be cutting edge. But the places and the moments made the meals.
Conversely, the formality of even “playful” haute cuisine – and the degree of planning required to get a reservation – tends to get in the way of such a happy confluence of people and timing.
Which isn’t to say that such restaurants can’t be memorable, sometimes even life changing. I will long remember the two on this year’s World’s 50 Best list that I’ve eaten at, Tim Raue in Berlin and Quique Dacosta in Denia, Spain: both served incredibly inventive food (though I remember Tim Raue more, if I’m honest, for the jaw-dropping industrial setting in an old East Berlin brewery.)
Here, roughly in the order I first ate at them, are some of the higher-end restaurants that have changed my thinking about food over the years, and how.
The Sugar Club, London: it seems a long time ago now that Peter Gordon’s first London restaurant, in Ladbroke Grove, was at the cutting edge of 1990s fusion cuisine. It and its successor, Providores, are long gone – and nor am I sure you could make much of a case for them having any lasting legacy. But in its day the Sugar Club was exciting and pushed boundaries with its fusion of European and Asian flavours. The first time I ate there, circa 1997, I was younger and had eaten in fewer high-end restaurants; I was greatly impressed. It’s also one the London restaurants which, like Yotam Ottolenghi’s Nopi and Rovi, have made an impact via their cookbooks – though there again, Gordon’s book does seem dated now.
Paul Bocuse, Lyon: Paul Bocuse (1926-2018) was a legendary figure in French cuisine, father of the 1970s Nouvelle Cuisine movement, unmistakeable in his toque and tricolore-trimmed kitchen whites. In 2000 we celebrated a friend’s birthday at the great man’s three-Michelin-star restaurant just outside Lyon: a couple of French friends we told agreed that eating at Bocuse was something you needed to do “une fois dans la vie”. At one point during a piece of extended culinary theatre that started with gasp-inducing pan-fried foie gras, I realised that Bocuse was standing by my side and asking me if the food was satisfactory. I think I managed to stammer “oui monsieur!” before confronting a cheese selection that took several minutes to assemble on folding stands stretching around one side of table. An unforgettable lesson in the power of great French cuisine. The restaurant is still going but has lost one of its stars - and its prices have risen painfully.
Chez Bruce, London: since 1995, Bruce Poole’s one-Michelin-star Wandsworth restaurant has been quietly turning out some of the best and most consistent French food in London. Hell, if you could count on getting French food this good in France, it would be a giant leap forward. Because Poole is Australian, he once upon a time got bracketed as a fusionist, but while there are some Asian influences on the menu, he’s really just endlessly tweaking French classics in subtle, unshowy but delicious ways. I went back for my birthday lunch a couple of months ago, after a gap of several years, and was enormously reassured to find Chez Bruce as good as ever. It also features a justly famed wine list.
Tickets, Barcelona: after the closure of El Bulli in 2011, Ferran Adriá’s brother Albert, the man who held down the kitchen on a day-to-day basis, opened Tickets in Barcelona’s then-seedy Poble Sec neighbourhood. It was a smaller place, quirky with a funfair theme – and it kept several El Bulli classics going, notably the “liquid olives”. This was genuinely astonishing food, at more modest prices than El Bulli – and as such quickly found itself on lists of the hardest-restaurants-in-the-world to get a reservation at. I went twice: each time my wife and I both logged on to the booking portal at the stroke of midnight Spanish time, two months ahead of the moment a new day’s covers became reservable. How we whooped when one of us secured a table! Sadly both Tickets and most of Adriá’s Poble Sec empire – including extraordinary Japanese-Peruvian fusion joint Pakta – fell victim to the Covid pandemic.
Studio, Copenhagen: Studio is a restaurant in the Standard complex on Copenhagen’s waterfront, the brainchild of Claus Meyer, co-founder with René Redzepi of Noma. It’s almost ten years since I ate there but it has ploughed a similar furrow to Noma, using ultra-local, sometimes foraged ingredients – and the results were stunning. As I wrote in the Evening Standard then, “A thread of smoke rose as our waiter applied a blowtorch to the pine twigs on the plate. The scent of smouldering pine mingled with the evocative flavours of the scallop whose shell nestled in the needles — yarrow, thyme, juniper and intense pine ice cream. Tears welled up in my wife’s eyes: ‘So many memories!’” Maybe I should have tried harder to get to Noma after all.
Casa Marcial, Arriondas, Spain: Nacho Manzano’s restaurant, in a hamlet perched by a mountain pass in the Asturias, is without doubt the most relaxed Michelin-starred restaurant (it has two) that I’ve ever eaten at. People seemed to wander in and out and timing felt very relaxed – indeed in total it took us nearly five hours to finish the lunchtime tasting menu. It’s full of moments of pure delight such as the seafood snacks served on a “beach” of sand and seaweed. Top-flight modern Spanish food with a genuine dedication to this distinctive corner of northern Spain, both mountains and sea: I actually felt like I understood the place better after our meal.
What I’ve been drinking this week
Barbadillo “Solear” Manzanilla - one of my go-to sherries, in part because it’s easily available in half bottles, this is textbook manzanilla from Sanlúcar de Barrameda: light, crisp with saline notes, just so fresh (The Wine Society, The Whisky Exchange, from £6.95/37.5cl, elsewhere in full bottles.)
Llopart Brut Reserva 2020, Corpinnat - a cava in all but name (see my piece from earlier this year about the complicated infighting among Spanish sparkling producers). From organically grown vines, this is clean, fresh and citrussy, with fine bubbles: a well above-average cava (Roving Sommelier Wines, The Wine Factor, Secret Bottle Shop, from £17.95; £10.20 a glass in Parrillan restaurant, Coal Drops Yard, where I drank it.)
The Society’s Exhibition Langhe Nebbiolo 2020 - I opened this and a Ribera del Duero to drink during the Italy-Spain Euro 2024 match last week: it must be said that the wines were closer matched in quality than the teams. This is made by Rizzi from younger Nebbiolo vines whose grapes will one day end up in the estate’s (much more expensive) Barbaresco. Bursting with bright cherry fruit and floral notes, this is amazing value and a fine introduction to northern Italy’s greatest red grape (The Wine Society, was £14.50 though currently out of stock.)
Transparency declaration: I ate at both Quique Dacosta and Casa Marcial on press trips as guests of the owners and have also eaten at Chez Bruce as the guest of wine press event.
I’d take the Bocuse!