The World’s 50 Best Restaurants List Is Broken

Atomix, the “best” restaurant in America.
Photo: Daniel Krieger

The annual unveiling of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants took place last night in Las Vegas, but you’d be forgiven if you were already in bed by the time the news was announced. Some notable establishments to make the ranking include Alchemist in Copenhagen, DiverXO in Madrid, OssoRio in Cape Town, the Chairman in Hong Kong, and Mingles in Seoul.

I completely made up one of the places above, but can you spot the fake name without cheating? Here’s a surprising hint: It’s not the restaurant called “DiverXO.”

The actual winner, I promise, is Disfrutar in Barcelona, and anyone who’s been watching the list can tell you that this accomplishment was a foregone conclusion, since the restaurant — where “table theater and interaction are frequent,” the 50 Best write-up warns — was ranked No. 3 in 2022 and No. 2 in 2023. Since the list-makers implemented a rule a few years back that forbids places from reappearing after having hit No. 1, Disfrutar’s eventual arrival on top was inevitable.

The list used to be an interesting counterpoint to Michelin’s longstanding dominance within the staid world of high-expense fine dining: Anointing Noma among the “best” restaurants on planet Earth at a time when the tire company’s inspectors were still warming to it sent a clear message that the culture of global gastro-tourism was evolving in ways that disrupted any traditional hierarchy. Now, by inching the same handful of spots up the ranks every 12 months, the 50 Best list itself has become predictable to the point of irrelevance.

Anyone who’s been watching this space knows we have long considered the entire exercise to be basically stupid, but imagine if the Motion Picture Academy, instead of giving Oscars to new films each spring, simply handed out awards to the same couple of dozen movies year after year after year. It would be a welcome development for anyone waiting to see Phantom Thread finally get its due as Best Picture but easy enough for everyone else to ignore.

The good news, of course, is that this means Atomix, the lone inclusion from New York and currently ranked No. 6, will become the “best” restaurant in the world in 2029. And a hearty congrats to DiverXO, which is on track to become the winner in just three years, despite possessing a website that looks like what would happen if an Aphex Twin album came to life.