When it comes to parsing the annual dining survey known as The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, though, you really have to open your mind. Forget asking whether these establishments are the best in the world. The bigger question is: Are they restaurants?
Gaggan, in Bangkok, was named not just the ninth-best restaurant in the world but the single best restaurant in Asia. The chef, Gaggan Anand, greets diners at his 14-seat table facing the kitchen with “Welcome to my … .” completing the sentence with a term, meaning a chaotic situation, that will not be appearing in The New York Times.
What follows are about two dozen dishes organized in two acts (with intermission). The menu is written in emojis. Each bite is accompanied by a long story from Mr. Anand that may or may not be true. The furrowed white orb splotched with what appears to be blood, he claims, is the brain of a rat raised in a basement feedlot.
Brains are big in other restaurants on the list. Rasmus Munk, chef of the eighth-best restaurant in the world, Alchemist, in Copenhagen, pipes a mousse of lamb brains and foie gras into a bleached lamb skull, then garnishes it with ants and roasted mealworms. Another of the 50 or so courses — the restaurant calls them “impressions”— lurks inside the cavity of a realistic, life-size model of a man’s head with the top of the cranium removed.
Now, among the 50 Best are a number of establishments where they let you see a menu written in real words and order things you actually want to eat. Some of these, like Asador Etxebarri in Spain and Schloss Schauenstein in Switzerland, are hard to reach. Nearly all are very expensive. Still, there are places on the list where a relatively normal person might eat a relatively normal dinner and go home feeling relatively well-fed.
But the list is dominated by places that normal people can’t get into, where the few diners who will go to almost any length for reservations will go home feeling bloated and drunk. They are not restaurants, or not just restaurants. They are endurance tests, theatrical spectacles, monuments to ego and — the two most frightening words in dining — “immersive experiences.”
Whether the World’s 50 Best seeks out these spectacular spectaculars or has simply been hijacked by them is impossible to tell. The list’s website is a model that should be studied by anyone who wants to arrange words that sound important and don’t mean anything.
On the subject of what it takes to win the attention of the 1,080 “independent experts” who make up the organization’s voting body, the website has this to say: “What constitutes ‘best’ is up to each voter to decide — as everyone’s tastes are different, so is everyone’s idea of what constitutes a great restaurant experience. Of course, the quality of food is going to be central, as is the service — but the style of both, the surroundings, atmosphere and indeed the price level are each more or less important for each different individual.”
Well, that clears up that.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and its spinoff awards, by now almost too numerous to count, weren’t always so rarefied. In the early years, when the list was being published by Restaurants magazine, the editors saw it as a kind of anti-Michelin, and took pride in recognizing spots that would never, ever make Michelin’s little red guidebooks.
No. 1 on the list that year, though, was the Spanish restaurant El Bulli, which set a standard for kitchen experimentation, highly manipulated food, restless change and marathon tastings to which the highest end of the business is still in thrall. The more famous the list became, the harder it was for a place like Carnivore to land a spot. Nobody much noticed, because the game that El Bulli played was starting to become the only one that mattered.
Today the list is dominated by tasting-menu restaurants, and every year those menus seem to get longer and more unforgiving. There are more courses than any rational person would choose to eat, and more tastes of more wines than anyone can possibly remember the next day. The spiraling, metastasizing length of these meals seems designed to convince you that there’s just no way a mere 10 or 15 courses could contain all the genius in the kitchen.
One well-traveled diner told me about a recent, four-hour meal at Disfrutar, in Barcelona — No. 1 this year. He said he was “blown away” and at the same time he never wants to go back. “It was an assault, and not fun,” he said.
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
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