With support from the French government, a new group has graded the world’s greatest restaurants.
What’s the greatest restaurant in the world? Top chefs and those who fork over their fortunes to eat their food are fascinated with the question. Now a new ranking has emerged to provide some extra fodder to the debate.
According to La Liste, a group convened by the France’s Foreign Minister and supported by the country’s tourism board, the top restaurant in the world is the Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, Switzerland. New York City’s Per Se has grabbed the number two spot, according to the new ranking. Tokyo’s Kyo Aji comes in third.
(Time.com) Devoted five-star diners will note that only one restaurant in La Liste’s top 10 can be found on the current leading ranking of top restaurants, the World’s 50 Best list. And there’s good reason. No French restaurant has broken into the top 10 of that list, sponsored by water-maker San Pellegrino, in the last four years. La Liste featured three French restaurants in its top ten. France’s exclusion from the upper rungs of the World’s 50 Best has angered leading French cultural figures proud of their country’s culinary tradition. Partly in response to this disappointment, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius launched the new initiative to promote French tourism and fine dining.
“The angle was not to promote French [restaurants] per se,” says La Liste’s Antoine Ribaut, “but to be objective, because we trust we have the good fine dining.” Ribaut says the World’s 50 Best list is not objective. Several media outlets have pointed out that the lack of transparency does raise questions about how that list, sponsored by San Pellegrino, is decided. (Ribaut has consulted for Time Inc. His father Jean-Claude, the long-time food critic for Le Monde, contributed to the project.)
- Joël Robuchon
- Alain Ducasse
- Pierre Gagnaire
- Martin Berasategui
- Daniel Boulud
- Nobuyuki Matsuhisa
- Gordon Ramsay
- Yannick Alleno
- Wolfgang Puck
- Gaston Acurio
Hoping to see Lebanon on the list in 2016. I nominate Burgundy!
