The 2011 top 50 are out.
Snapping at the heels of Michelin's gastronomic dominance with its emphatically internationalist line-up and chef heavy London ceremony, the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards is a far cry from the red guide's annual pre-publication leak and subsequent sniping over who got too many stars, who not enough.
The top 50 departs from the diner reviews of Zagat's or Harden's, and Michelin with its byzantine system and secretive reviewers. Here a mix of critics, restaurateurs, chefs and gastronomes vote to rank winners, with results that can markedly contrast with the established status quo. This year, world number one Noma was awarded two out of three possible stars by Michelin inspectors. Japan, with its reverence for cuisine focused on locally sourced seasonal ingredients and artful presentation saw two restaurants in the top 50 - in the world of Michelin, Tokyo is more starred than any other city.
At the awards in London's Guildhall, the judges announced their criteria, in an attempt, perhaps, to widen the gap between the awards and more traditional guides: "no entry checklists, no entry criteria to fill... Each individual's dining experience is subjective," and significantly, "it is a survey of current tastes." A survey of the zeitgeist it is, with the top ten located somewhere along the techno-emotional cuisine/molecular gastronomy scale that defines the deconstruction and innovation that has forged a new culinary language of flavour, texture and presentation in the world's top kitchens.
With elBulli out of the race - a debatable exclusion considering that it remains open until 2012 - Spain (or Basque and Catalan cuisine) still shone, with El Celler De Can Roca and Mugaritz moving up two places each, to second and third respectively, while Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck (UK number one) dropped two places to fifth. For the second year René Redzepi's Noma trumped, not only for its Nordic take on modernist cuisine but also a rigid, almost mystical adherence to the seasons and locality with an emphasis on foraged ingredients.
It's no surprise that so many of the winners are not only at the technical cutting edge, but focused on seasonality, locality and the back-to-nature dishes that represent an expression of a 'closed ecosystem', as Redzepi explains in Noma, Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine: "If we had one special ingredient, we surrounded it with the foodstuffs it lived among or on, for instance wild boar with corn and berries." Noma uses a network of 70 or so collectors, fisherman and farmers, who constantly update Noma's kitchen with their latest haul, produce or finds. The process lends a serendipitous, intensely creative air to the kitchen and resulting menu.
Elsewhere, London's Hakkasan, Zuma, Le Gavroche, Bar Boulud, Nahm and Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley made the top 100.
René Redzepi, Le Gavroche's Michel Roux Jr and Marcus Wareing will appear at Taste of London 2011.