Here is the Good Food Guide 2016 Top 50 restaurant ranking, which  is highly regarded by chefs and restaurant-goers alike, with particular attention paid to those chefs and restaurants who make it into the Top 10.

The Good Food Guide 2016

The Good Food Guide is edited by Elizabeth Carter and was founded back in 1949, when Raymond Postgate wrote a heartfelt piece calling for a ‘campaign against cruelty to food’, a typical restaurant meal included soup from a tin, soggy steak from Argentina, synthetic cream and tinned Empire fruit. Raymond’s article inspired an army of like-minded people to report on places where the food was decent and The Good Food Guide was created. 

How the Good Food Guide list is created

The Top 50 recognises the very best talent in the country; a place on the list represents a huge achievement, with each position earned by its score in The Good Food Guide, editor appraisal and strength of reader feedback.

>>> Good Food Guide 2016 top 50 pubs - see the full list

A top score of 10 means "Just perfect dishes, showing faultless technique at every service; extremely rare, and the highest accolade the Guide can give."

New in the top 10 this year are Fraiche and Midsummer House and new in the Top 50 are Adams, Lake Road Kitchen, The Dairy, Llangoed Hall and Sketch.

Good Food Guide 2016 top 5:

1 L'Enclume, Cumbria (10)

2 Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, London (10)

3 Pollen Street Social, London (9)

4 Restaurant Nathan Outlaw, Cornwall (9)

5 Hibiscus, London (9)

 The very first Good Food Guide was published in 1951

The guide celebrates its 65th anniversary this year, with the very first Good Food Guide published in 1951. It was a hardback of 224 pages, cost five shillings and listed ‘600 places throughout Britain where you can rely on a good meal at a reasonable price’. The guide is still compiled with the reliance on reader feedback of eateries up and down the country together with anonymous inspections by a team of experts. It was a Good Food Guide inspector who suggested that a café in an unexpected location was worth further investigation.