Being media literate these days means understanding not to take ranking lists literally, whether they’re “The 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time” or “The 35 Cutest Dog Breeds of All Time.” We all know that the cuteness of Maltese-poodle crosses and the awesomeness of Keith Moon are polarizing issues.
But when it comes to analyzing the annual food and beverage survey known as “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” you really need to be open-minded. Don’t ask whether these restaurants are the best in the world. The bigger question is, are they restaurants?
Here’s a look at some of this year’s top winners: The winners were announced Wednesday night at a ceremony at the Wynn Las Vegas, which began with dancers in feather headdresses and paint twirling light sticks to electronic dance music on a darkened stage.
At Gaggan in Bangkok, named not only the ninth best restaurant in the world but also the only one in Asia, chef Gaggan Anand greets diners at a table of 14 facing the kitchen, saying, “Welcome to my restaurant,” ending the greeting with a word that refers to chaos, but which the New York Times won’t print.
What follows is a two-act, two-course meal of about 24 dishes. The menu is written in emojis. Every bite is accompanied by a lengthy story from Anand that may or may not be true: The wrinkled white spheres speckled with what looks like blood are rat brains, he claims, raised in an underground vivarium.
Brains also play a major role at other restaurants on the list: At the world’s eighth-best restaurant, Copenhagen’s Alchemist, chef Rasmus Munk pours a lamb’s brain and foie gras mousse into a bleached lamb’s skull and garns it with ants and roasted mealworms. Another of the 50 or so courses (which the restaurant calls “Impressions”) is hidden inside the cavity of a life-sized replica of a man’s head with the top of the skull removed.
Now, there are many places on the list where you can see a menu in real language and order what you actually want to eat. Some of these places, like Asador Etxebarri in Spain or Schloss Schauenstein in Switzerland, are hard to get to; almost all are very expensive. Still, there are places on the list where a relatively normal person could have a relatively normal dinner and go home relatively full.
But the bulk of this list is made up of places off-limits to most people, where the few who go to great lengths to get a reservation go home feeling bloated and drunk. These aren’t restaurants, or even just restaurants: they’re endurance tests, theatrical spectacles, monuments to self-worth, and the two most dreaded words in dining: “immersive experiences.”
I don’t know if “World’s 50 Best” sought out these amazing sights or if they were simply hijacked. The list’s website is a model that should be studied by anyone who wants to string together important-sounding but meaningless words.
As for the question of what it takes to catch the attention of the 1,080 “independent experts” who make up the organization’s voting body, the website states: “What constitutes ‘best’ is up to each individual voter to decide. Just as tastes vary, so do ideas of what constitutes a great restaurant experience. Of course, the quality of the food is central, as is the service, but the style of both, the surroundings, the ambience, and the price level can be more or less important to different individuals.”
Well, that’s obvious. that.
The now-countless “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” and its offshoots weren’t always so rare. In the early days of the list, published by Restaurant magazine, its editors saw it as a kind of anti-Michelin, and took pride in honoring establishments that would never make it into Michelin’s little red guidebook. Carnivore, an outdoor meat buffet outside Nairobi, Kenya, made the list in 2003, coming in at No. 47.
But it was the Spanish restaurant El Bulli that came in first on that year’s list. El Bulli set the standard of kitchen experimentation, highly processed food, constant change, and marathon tastings that the industry’s best restaurants are still held to. The more famous the list became, the harder it was for a place like Carnivore to get first place. Nobody paid much attention, because the game El Bulli played was starting to become the only one that mattered.
Today, that list is dominated by restaurants that offer tasting menus that seem to get longer and more relentless with each passing year, with more courses than any rational person would want to eat, and more wine tastings than anyone could remember the next day. The spiraling length of these meals seems designed to convince us that it’s impossible to encompass the full genius of any given culinary genius in just 10 or 15 courses.
One well-traveled diner described a recent four-hour meal at Disfrutar (number one this year) in Barcelona, which he said left him “shocked” but also said he never wanted to go back. “It was an assault, it was no fun,” he said.
Once a pleasant surprise, visits to the kitchen and other parts of the establishment are now almost mandatory for any restaurant hoping to make the list. The recipe for success is so well-known that the structure of meals at these restaurants is strangely and depressingly subservient, yet surprising in its inventiveness. Once a rebellion against a stuffy and conservative dining hierarchy, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants is now a celebration of a different kind of stuffiness and conservatism.
The list’s underlying contradiction is that it has become a promotional device to direct enormous attention and business to some of the world’s least accessible dining rooms.
Chefs may delude themselves into thinking they’re running idea factories, offering intellectual journeys and emotional shocks, but in reality they’re competing for votes in listicles that dwarf whatever they accomplish in the dining room into a string of World’s 50 Best websites’ clichés. This year’s third best restaurant, Table by Bruno Verjus, offers “great wine and incredible food.” A meal at Disfrutar is “a once-in-a-lifetime dining experience.”
That sounds amazing! And incredible! But the question I’m wondering about this once-in-a-lifetime experience is, will I have a good time? But that’s not a question The World’s 50 Best Restaurants is designed to answer.
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