Osteria Francescana Tops List of World’s 50 Best Restaurants
A restaurant in Modena, Italy, won the top prize Monday night as the 2016 edition of the influential World’s 50 Best Restaurants list was unveiled at a New York City gathering attended by hundreds of chefs from around the world.
Last year’s top two winners exchanged places: Osteria Francescana
became the first Italian restaurant to reach No. 1, while El Celler de
Can Roca in Catalonia, Spain, dropped to No. 2. Eleven Madison Park in
Manhattan moved up from No. 5 to No. 3.
But
the biggest surprise was the announcement that the Copenhagen
restaurant Noma was chosen No. 5; it had been in the top three every
year since 2009.
Two
other American restaurants made the list for the first time: Saison in
San Francisco, with a high debut at No. 27, and Estela, on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan, was No. 44. Le Bernardin, in New York, fell to
24 from 18; Alinea, in Chicago, moved up to 15 from 26; and Blue Hill at
Stone Barns, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., rose to 48 from 49.
Three
other American restaurants landed on the organization’s “long list” of
100 for the first time: Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare; Benu, in San
Francisco; and Cosme, in New York, one of the few restaurants on the
list with a woman, Daniela Soto-Innes, in charge of the kitchen.
In April, Dominique Crenn was named World’s Best Female Chef, despite the fact that her San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn, has never appeared on the list. The New York chef April Bloomfield cooked for the event, though she has so far been excluded.
The list of restaurants ranked 51 through 100 was announced last week. Both Per Se and the French Laundry
showed up there, dropping their esteemed American chef, Thomas Keller,
from the top 50. Three American restaurants fell off the list
altogether: Coi, in San Francisco; and Masa and the NoMad, both in New
York.
Since
it began in 2002, the list has proved its power, making international
stars of chefs like René Redzepi, Magnus Nilsson and Andoni Luis Aduriz,
whose culinary innovations or remote locations (or both) would have
once kept their restaurants from being internationally famous. It has
become so popular (and profitable, with the opportunity for multiple
sponsorships) that sub-lists — 50 Best Restaurants in Asia, 50 Best
Restaurants in South America — have been established, with more to come.
This
was the first time since the awards began that the event took place
outside London, a move intended to highlight haute cuisine’s
increasingly global and decreasingly Eurocentric focus. (Next year’s
awards ceremony will be held in Melbourne, Australia.)
“Putting
the chefs all together in New York allows for amazing conversations
that wouldn’t happen otherwise,” said Sean Brock, a chef from
Charleston, S.C., whose adventurous Southern restaurant, Husk,
has yet to crack the list. “Being around the people that operate the
best restaurants in the world helps me see the big picture.”
With success has come scrutiny. Some chefs, on and off the list, have asserted that lobbying plays a part in how the list is compiled;
last year, a short-lived movement called Occupy50Best protested what it
called the awards’ cronyism and sexism. (The honored chefs are
overwhelmingly male and, on the world list, overwhelmingly white.)
Many other chefs are uncomfortable spending time and money to jockey for a higher position.
“Traveling
to prepare dinners for journalists or voters, hiring specialized P.R.,
targeting special media — playing the game can be fun, but ultimately it
is a distraction from who we are and why we work at Manresa,” said
David Kinch, whose Bay Area restaurant is at No. 83 this year.
William
Reed Media, the British media company that administers the awards, has
made steps toward transparency, including hiring the Deloitte firm to
oversee the ballots that come in from 27 regions and more than 1,000
voters worldwide.
This
year, some “academy chairs” (the regional chiefs who choose the voters)
who had potential conflicts of interest stepped down: Boris Yu,
chairman for China and Korea, who is also a restaurant owner in Hong
Kong; Roser Torras, chairman for Spain, who is a well-known restaurant
publicist; and Andrea Petrini, chairman for France, who is an organizer
of prestigious culinary events. All were replaced by journalists.
But the voting system,
in which voters are not necessarily anonymous and are allowed to accept
free meals and trips, is still a consistent target of criticism. So is
the list’s tendency to elevate cutting-edge gastronomy above traditional
cuisine.
And
so is the very notion that all the restaurants in the world — of every
kind, in every country — can be ordered according to which is “best.”
Andre
Chiang, a chef in Singapore who consistently appears on the list, said
that the list’s embrace of the new is more important than its rankings.
“I
always say that this list is not about rank or who’s on top of the
other,” he said. “But it is an indication of trend and direction,
because these 50 chefs who choose to step out from their comfort zone
are pushing the boundaries and leading the culinary scene of tomorrow.”
A complete list of winners is on the organization’s website.
Continue reading the main story
