The World's 50 Best Restaurants List Comes Out Monday. Already, There's Drama.
Will René Redzepi's Noma once again be crowned the world's best? We'll find out on Monday.
It's that time of year again: The World's 50 Best Restaurants. While the final list won't be announced until Monday in London, there's already drama in the air. As a precursor to the final list, the magazine has named the restaurants in slots 51 through 100, and there are some surprisingly big names on it. As in, names that won't be included on the Top 50 list. One year after falling from number 29 to number 40 (and losing a star in The New York Times' review in the process), Daniel Boulud's flagship New York City restaurant, Daniel, fell all the way down to number 80. Notable American restaurants that have also fallen out of the top 50 this year are David Kinch's Manresa in Los Gatos, California, and Daniel Patterson's Coi in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, a movement called Occupy 50 Best started by three friends in France (a blogger, a documentary maker and a PR-agency owner) is gaining some attention for calling for increased transparency in the awards. The creators — who have begun gathering signatures for a petition — call the awards "opaque, sexist and complacent." They argue that the process of selecting the award's jury and its winners is unexplained, biased, and male-dominated and that many regions are underrepresented.
In any case, thousands of people around the world will tune in on Monday, curious to see whether René Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen can claim the list's top spot for the fifth time in six years. The only certainty is that whichever restaurant is crowned the world's best better have a plan in place to expand its already extensive waitlist.
Refresh your memory on the World's Best Restaurants on Food Republic: