It’s the list of all culinary lists. Only the best of the best have been meticulously tried, tested, quaffed, sipped and digested from every corner of the globe to make the San Pellegrino & Aqua Panna World’s Top 50 Restaurants.
The list was announced today with Danish restaurant, Noma, regaining its crown as the globe’s best.The Copenhagen restaurant, which has two Michelin stars, held the top spot from 2010 to 2012, but was bumped off it last year by Spanish restaurant El Celler de Can Roca, which dropped this year to come in second.Noma is a 45-seat restaurant located in a dockside warehouse and is famous for providing an unusual gastronomic experience for diners. The restaurant aims to reimagine Nordic cuisine, and its name is a combination of two Danish words ‘nordisk’ (Nordic) and ‘mad’ (food).Patrons are served a series of small dishes, which include sea urchin toast, caramelised milk with cod liver, moss and mushrooms, pickled vegetables with smoked bone marrow (pictured) and beef tartar and live ants. Ants? Wow. No words. I can only dream of what it what it would be like to dine here!
El Celler de Can Roca, which received second place, was voted number one in last year’s list.The restaurant is run by brothers Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca and serves traditional Catalan dishes with ‘creative’ twists, and is known for its unusual presentation of dishes, such as caramelised olives served on a bonsai tree.Spain was well-represented in the list, with seven of the top 50 restaurants hailing from the nation, a number only matched by the USA, which also had seven restaurants in the list.
Two U.S. restaurants made it to the top ten, Eleven Madison Park in New York, which ranked fourth and Alinea in Chicago, which climbed back to ninth position after slipping down in the rankings to number 15 last year.