The highs and lows of this year's World's 50 Best Restaurant awards

Around 10.30pm on Wednesday in Bilbao’s cavernous dockside concert hall, the Euskalduna Palace, the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards ceremony finally reached its climax. The audience was eager, warmed up by crashing music and tourist videos, and urged by presenter Mark Durden-Smith, of I’m A Celebrity fame, to “milk the attention of the cameras”. A young Californian Instagram influencer cried and white smoke probably emerged from the ventilation shafts of the Vatican kitchens as Massimo Bottura, chef patron of Modena’s Osteria Francescana, in outsized bowtie and red sash, stepped up to brandish his trophy and exult in what it represented, “the power of chefs to change the world” no less.

Nice try, and at least Bottura’s projects of cutting food waste and feeding the homeless entitle him to some credibility, but otherwise the world-changing conceit rang as hollow as Durden-Smith’s reference to “girl power”.

Hot among discussion topics in Bilbao was precisely the scarcity of that “girl power”, as only three of the last Top 50 were women. It has long been a controversial list because of this, but the 50 Best claims it will not adjust the awards artificially.

Both recipients of 50 Best’s controversial Best Female Chef award (which insinuates women need their own category), the Slovenian Ana Ros last year and the UK’s Clare Smyth in 2018, said they’d been urged dozens of times to reject the award on the grounds of its discriminatory character. Smyth’s new restaurant, Core, failed to make it into the Top 50, apparently because it had been open less than half the voting period, according to Xanthe Clay, UK and Ireland jury chair. Elena Arzak, star chef daughter of the celebrated Basque restaurant dynasty, stated that almost half of her personnel had been female for decades, and it was no big deal because Basque women had always been dominant in home cooking.

But cheerfully oblivious to all this were the txokos – traditional Basque male dining clubs – of Bilbao. The txoko Athletic Juvenil, which hosted a succession of meals for World’s Best guests, isn’t planning to change its rather archaic policy (women only as guests and never in the kitchen) any time soon.

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The rest of the higher rankings constituted a minor adjustment of 2017. The placid besuited Catalan trio of the Roca brothers’ Celler de Can Roca up one place to number two, the Argentinian Mauro Colagreco’s French Riviera Mirazur continuing its path to stardom at number three (and his Parisian mentor Alain Passard’s Arpege up three places to number eight); and last year’s number one, the New York Eleven Madison Avenue, now at number four with new premises, having apparently trashed their old ones first with a wild party in the modern food is rock and roll manner. It was left to the UK representatives to demonstrate British sangfroid as three existing London listings sank slightly, the Clove Club down from 26 to 33, The Ledbury 27 to 42 and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal 36 to 45. This was alleviated by the arrival of a fourth British entry, Lyle’s, at 38, placing the UK on a par with Italy, though the totally London-centric ranking contrasted unfortunately with the more diverse entries from Italy, and indeed France, Spain and the US – the other leaders in terms of numbers.

But considering its title referring to a global ranking, the awards are very Eurocentric, with Africa showing one result, a white South African, and the great food powerhouse of Asia and the culinary booming region of Latin America only having seven each compared to Europe’s 27, or 28 if you include Turkey (Mikla, of Istanbul, since you ask).

The meaning of these moves on a highly elitist hit parade of what the World’s 50 Best group editor, William Drew, admits are “fine dining restaurants” is somewhat opaque, and indeed irrelevant to much of the public not possessed of jobs in the industry, or for platinum Diners Club cards, complimentary media invitations or those with a taste for convoluted author cuisine.

A tendency for slightly more down-to-earth cooking is evident among places like Lyle’s, the Ledbury, Septime in Paris or the splendid local grill specialist Asador de Etxebarri, down the road from Bilbao. But notwithstanding the equally strong trend to riff wittily on traditional recipes, witness Bottura’s potato spaghetti with ham broth and truffle, much of the 50 Best fare is achingly cutting edge – and some of the more rococo inventions, particularly of the Spanish molecular mob, are borderline bonkers.

Nonetheless, to some of the chefs food awards like the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and programmes like Netflix’s Chef’s Table can matter hugely. Ros, owner and chef at Hiša Franko in Slovenia (back in the top 50 this year at number 48) commented that the combined effect of the Best Female Chef award and her own episode of Chef’s Table in 2017 obliged her overnight to increase her staff from 15 to 40, and saw her voted ninth most famous person in Slovenia, after six footballers, the Slovenian president and Melania Trump.

Aside from the lack of women on the list, another opaque area is how the results are reached, in spite of the 50 Best’s diligent efforts to demonstrate transparency by employing the international auditors Deloitte to carry out random checks on jurors’ accounts. But the jury of 1,040 voters is anonymous, selected by 26 regional chairs, and charged to submit online votes, with some for their own region and some for other parts of the world – all of which they must have visited within the preceding 18 months.

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Any voter is free to include the local pizzeria, if so desired, though the chances of it showing on the listings radar are zero. The “foreign” votes tend to accrue naturally to commonly visited places like Paris and New York, and establishments that contrive to attract plenty of media visits or master the creation of the crucial factor, buzz.

Since the awards moved out of London in 2016, host locations compete for the privilege. If the Diputacion de Vizcaia, the government of the Basque region of Biscay, spent €500,000 (£439,000) to bring the 50 Best gala to its capital, it was in the hope not only of generating an estimated €100m in future income for the region’s businesses, but also creating tourism publicity for a region which legitimately regards itself as one of the richest gastronomic zones of Europe.

Outside is a fanzone and stalls run by the restaurants catered to the extremely food-savvy Basque public. But in spite of the ubiquitous street posterage, there seemed to be uncertainty as to what the 50 Best Awards were. The venerable Michelin still holds sway as authority, but the Spanish Academy of Gastronomy announced its own awards a week earlier, and other listings and prizes are increasingly entering the fray. Next year, the confusingly named World Restaurant Awards, started by two former founding members of the World’s 50 Best, aims to create an Oscars-style televisual event. Employing a panel of 100 soon-to-be-named experts, which already includes a number of chefs from among the 50 Best coterie, it nonetheless proposes to have a category for more accessible establishments. Backed by a major international organiser of events, including the Miss Universe contest, it’s presumably aiming to lay on buzz by the tankload, and a veritable tsunami of emotion, at least among chefs and Instagram influencers.

1. Osteria Francescana, Modena
2. El Celler de Can Roca, Girona
3. Mirazur, Menton, France
4. Eleven Madison Park, New York
5. Gaggan, Bangkok
6. Central Restaurante, Lima
7. Maido, Lima
8. Arpège, Paris
9. Mugaritz, San Sebastián
10. Asador Etxebarri, Axpe
11. Quintonil, Mexico City
12. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Pocantico Hills, New York
13. Pujol, Mexico City
14. Steirereck, Vienna
15. White Rabbit, Moscow
16. Piazza Duomo, Alba
17. Den, Tokyo
18. Disfrutar, Barcelona
19. Geranium, Copenhagen
20. Attica, Melbourne
21. Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, Paris
22. Narisawa, Tokyo
23. Le Calandre, Rubano, Italy
24. Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet, Shanghai
25. Cosme, New York
26. Le Bernardin, New York
27. Boragó, Santiago
28. Odette, Singapore
29. Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen, Paris
30. D.O.M., São Paulo
31. Arzak, San Sebastián
32. Tickets, Barcelona
33. The Clove Club, London
34. Alinea, Chicago
35. Maaemo, Oslo
36. Ristorante Reale, Castel di Sangro, Italy
37. Restaurant Tim Raue, Berlin
38. Lyle's, London
39. Astrid y Gastón, Lima
40. Septime, Paris
41. Nihonryori RyuGin, Tokyo
42. The Ledbury, London
43. Azurmendi, Larrabetzu, Spain
44. Mikla, Istanbul
45. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, London
46. Saison, San Francisco
47. Schloss Schauenstein, Fürstenau, Switzerland
48. Hiša Franko, Kobarid, Slovenia
49. Nahm, Bangkok
50. The Test Kitchen, Cape Town