I wonder if Eleven Madision will be eligible for consideration next year. Same physical location but a radically different restaurant. Noma is not that different.
I have. Generally, I have little interest in restaurants that serve $400 meals on 24" plates with 2 oz of food that looks prepped for a magazine shoot instead of dinner, maybe with a little “smoke.” I am generally not impressed with the “impressive” and the twee and the ostentatious. And so far as I can tell that is nearly all this list has to offer.
But yes I have. They were not the best dining experiences I have had, but my quibble is not really with the restaurants themselves but with the entire “50 best” enterprise, picked by a small elitist group who have not eaten at .000002% of the world’s restaurants combined.
I frankly use the sports rule of “if you don’t like the other team beating you, get better!” So if someone keeps winning, they are generally winning again for a reason.
This is going to sound terribly egotistical, but I won American Lawyer’s Litigator of the Week award once, and my practice group was in the top rung in its category for more than a decade running. I got top marks from Chambers (a rating service for lawyers) from their first survey until the year AFTER I retired (against my wishes, my former firm included me in their pitch presentation to give it more heft even though I no longer worked there – another story) and all of the above was total and complete bullshit. My firm’s media types made the most of every bit of it, but there was zero science behind the selections and it was all just a game. Once you land on one such list, you make all of them. As I said, total bullshit.
Our participation in this wine board, along with our collective tendency to coalesce around worthwhile producers, is precisely the sort of “elitist” behavior you condemn. We also haven’t tasted the tiniest fraction of all the wines in the world. If you truly are an award winning litigator you’re being surprisingly incoherent
You’re absolutely right about my lack of experience with the “wines of the world,” which is why I stay out of the “best wines of 19XX” or worse, “best wines” overall threads. It would be mindbogglingly arrogant for me to express a view on the topic.
Looks like they may have made an exception for Noma because of the new location. I’m not sure I’m down with the idea that all the best restaurants are $500 pp+, multi-course extravaganzas, but if you accept that premise, this is a good list.
Friends are taking us in the next few years. They’ve been to all of the heavy hitters and say that there are many other restaurants which are even better.
I think the rules (whether they are followed or not) is that voters are supposed to have eaten at a restaurant within the last 18 months to be able to bite for it.
if Noma 2.0 got back in the mix because it’s a different restaurant then you can’t say it won 5 times and equal to el bulli…Noma won 4x and Noma 2.0 1x…but Rene is first to be #1 at two different restaurants and has 5x wins as a chef
I think in terms of Peru, I have heard that the voters are divided into regional groups…And a lot of the success of a region in getting a restaurant high on the list is how aligned a regions voters are in who they vote for…if all the voters in a region support the same restaurant vs if the voters in a region spread their support across lots of restaurants
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