Yesterday saw the release of the very first La Liste with Lausanne, Switzerland-based Le Restaurant de l'Hotel de Ville, run by French-born chef Benoit Violier taking the top spot.
La Listeranks the world's top 1,000 restaurants by aggregating scores of some 4,000 establishments in more than 200 international guidebooks and websites, including France's Gault-Milau and Michelin but also newspaper rankings, food blogs and customer-review based sites such as Tripadvisor.
But how did the British restaurants fair? And is this list one which restaurateurs and chefs should embrace or is it just a flash in the pan?
This year’s World’s 50 Best saw the cream of the crop of global cooking descend on London as they do every year - they are all hoping to be included and/or to have moved up the ranking. Five French restaurants featured with the highest, the Mirazur in Menton, coming in at 11th place. "What is missing is an objective ranking of global gastronomy," said Philippe Faure, a French diplomat in charge of tourism promotion and head of the Tables of Five Continents association that publishes La Liste.
It’s fair to say the French were not happy about this and so La Liste was born, whether it was born out of pettiness or it is a justified creation destined for longevity remains to be seen. The La Liste website states: “Food is a global obsession.
Every year, experts and amateurs create and publish millions of restaurant reviews. LA LISTE uses score averaging and semantic analysis to keep up, searching in 200+ food guides, review sites, gourmet blogs, social media, and major national and local publications in 48 countries.
The result is LA LISTE: 1,000 Remarkable Restaurants highlighting most-loved food destinations worldwide. “At the heart of our rankings is an algorithm that quantifies the epicurian pleasure experienced by critics and diners like you - because gastronomy is the art of using food to create happiness. We believe that numbers speak for themselves, and we are here to translate them into a language for gourmands everywhere.”
The list is vast to say the least and judging by La Liste’s twitter feed it has so far been welcomed by those restaurants lucky enough to be featured. The top restaurant in the list is Lausanne, Switzerland-based Le Restaurant de l'Hotel de Ville, run by French-born chef Benoit Violier. World’s 50 Best top restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, only comes in at 6th place in the French list.
Guy Savoy in Paris is ranked 4th, Maison Troisgros in Roanne 8th, l'Auberge du Vieux Puits in Fontjoucouse 9th, and in 10th spot is the Tokyo-based restaurant of French chef Joel Robuchon. "The international rankings are not always transparent or objective and we observe that they have a bias towards playing down French gastronomy," said Florian Escudie, a French foreign ministry tourism advisor.
A claim I’m sure would be heavily disputed by William Drew, editor of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. We spoke to him earlier in the year and he reiterated that 'it is a truly international organisation', with almost 1,000 voters spread across the world (and not 10 per country, as was incorrectly reported, but 36 in every voting region, some of which are made up of one country, others by a number of countries).
He said at the time: "We have no inherent British bias, nor any bias towards any other country – least of all France, which is recognised as home to many superb restaurants and the cradle of much culinary development. Indeed in 2014 there were just three UK restaurants featured in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, as opposed to five in France. Over our list’s 12-year history, more restaurants from France have appeared than any other country – and more French chefs have featured than any other nationality, by some distance."
And so onto the list itself, La Liste includes 47 British, 127 Japanese, 116 French, 97 American and 73 Chinese restaurants, as well as more than 50 Spanish and German establishments. The first British restaurant to appear is Gordon Ramsay, coming in at number 41 – the UK does not feature again until 150 with the Fat Duck and then again at 201 with Gidleigh Park.
With all lists involving restaurants it will always be a matter of opinion but for now it seems it has definitely caused a stir, (there is no getting away from the amount of French chefs who appear) – so much so the La Liste website crashed just hours after it was launched. Only time will tell if this list can embed itself among the culinary masses.
Competition among these ranking systems can only be a good thing for diners as they will inevitably all have to up their game if they want to be the best, therefore giving consumers what you would hope are the most accurate, consistent places to dine.
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