Can there ever be such a thing as the world’s best restaurant? An impossibility, say the sceptics – how can you judge an establishment in a centuries old warehouse on the Baltic Sea against a place in an abandoned biscuit factory in Africa? Well, nearly a thousand people have done just that – and judged Noma, in Copenhagen, to be the world’s best restaurant, while the Test Kitchen, in Cape Town, made it onto the list for the first time.
In little more than a decade, the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards have become the closest thing there is to a culinary Oscars. The awards ceremony, attended by hundreds of the world’s leading chefs and food critics at London’s Guildhall last month, was streamed and tweeted around the globe, while the chefs themselves partied till dawn at the Clove Club in east London’s Shoreditch.
The list, compiled by nearly a thousand of the industry’s food critics and chefs, has achieved international fame for many of the participants, while others question the validity of such an enterprise.