A press release landed in my inbox today. World’s 50 Best had just added more than 650 new venues to its Discovery platform, and folded vineyards into it as a browsable category for the first time. Restaurants, bars, hotels, and now vineyards, all in one guide. Over 800 cities and towns are now represented. Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Jamaica are appearing for the first time. This is great, but reading it, something I have thought for years, finally pushed itself to the front of my mind.
The Promotion
World’s 50 Best does something valuable when it works as intended. Discovery is populated in part by W50best voters who travel on their own steam and pay their own way, and it is precisely those independent voters who surface the small hotel in Okinawa or the bar in Miyazaki that nobody flew them out to visit. That matters. But those same hidden gems rarely climb onto the actual ranked list, because climbing that takes the concentrated volume of votes that only funded hosting reliably produces. Still, World’s 50 Best matters, for the places that do make the ranked list too, even the ones that got there partly through hosting, and for the culture built around the whole thing. It has turned food into something closer to rock’n’roll, foodies chasing reservations and flights the way people once chased tour dates, and that energy is a real kind of value on its own, whatever the ranking actually measures underneath it.
The Guest List
People in food circles have talked about this for years, quietly, rarely in print. To get on the list, with very few exceptions, you need a large budget to fly in journalists, house them, feed them, and do it again next year. But that only explains a third of what actually decides the list. The voting Academy is built as an even split, roughly a third food writers and critics, a third chefs and restaurateurs, a third well-travelled gourmets. Each third is won in a different way, and in most cases, only one of them is won with a plane ticket. Even the other two are not free of geography. A chef in a city other chefs rarely pass through, or a kitchen off the well-travelled gourmet’s usual route, still struggles to gather enough votes; money is not the only gate, but it is the widest one.
It is worth explaining why hosting became the only route. It is not really a story about greed – media outlets do not fund travel the way they used to; journalists do not earn enough to fly themselves around the world tasting their way onto a list. If a restaurant wants to be experienced by the people who vote, inviting them is often the only way left. Nobody is doing anything underhanded by hosting. The problem is not the mechanism itself; the problem is that only restaurants with real money behind them can afford to use the one mechanism that still works, which means the list ends up measuring who can afford to be experienced, not who deserves to be.
None of this means an invited journalist simply votes for whoever paid for the trip. I have been on every side of this myself, hosting journalists as a PR, being hosted as a guest, and paying my own way, weighing several invitations a month against each other and against everywhere I ate locally in between. Being hosted, got a restaurant in front of me; it never guaranteed anything. The meal still had to hold up against everything else I ate that year, hosted or not. What hosting buys is the chance to be judged at all, it does not buy the verdict.
But that is exactly why volume matters so much. A restaurant hosting a hundred journalists a year does not need any of them to be biased, and it does not need most of them either. If even one in ten of the journalists it hosts genuinely rates the meal highly enough to vote for it, a hundred invitations produce ten honest votes. A restaurant hosting three journalists a year, at that same one-in-ten conversion rate, produces less than one. That is the entire mechanism in one sentence: nobody needs to buy an opinion; they only need to buy enough attempts that the ordinary rate of genuine enthusiasm does the rest.
Money does not buy bad food a place on the list. Very few fly in more than a hundred potential voters a year for a restaurant that falls apart under scrutiny. But it does buy the numbers, and visibility is the thing that measures, dressed up as excellence. A good restaurant with a big budget will always outrank a better restaurant with a small budget or no budget at all, because the second one is invisible to the people voting.
Take a restaurant backed by one of the wealthiest men in a certain country. A few years ago, it hosted more than a hundred journalists across two events, flights, hotels, and meals, all covered. It went to number one on the list not long after. I was invited to both events but attended only one and had to decline the other for personal reasons. The restaurant is genuinely good; this was never questionable. The question is whether it would have reached number one without that spend, and I do not think it would have.
Or take a newer restaurant, in a different country, backed by a group of very wealthy investors. Those investors cover flights, hotels and dinners for journalists invited directly, with no PR agency involved at all. Drivers waiting at the airport, a press tour, dinner, time spent hanging out with the chef, it is all visible if you follow the right accounts. It is a simpler version of the same spend, without a strategy behind it, and it still works if the chef focuses on networking more than he does on cooking. I wrote before about exactly the opposite kind of chef (the one focused on cooking), in What Bertrand Never Needed, a piece built entirely around what happens when someone refuses to play this game at all.
There is a third version of the same distortion, and it explains the foodie third of the vote as much as the journalist third. In one of the countries, a casual, inexpensive restaurant serving simple, pleasant but not exceptional food sits well above a serious, ambitious kitchen doing far more demanding work, and has for years. The affordable place has also hosted a considerable amount of press over that time, while the serious kitchen has done very little of it. So this is not a case of affordability alone against a level playing field; the affordable place has two advantages stacked on top of each other, the journalist third and the foodie third at once, while the serious kitchen is trying to win on quality with almost nothing behind it. Far more well-travelled foodies and locals can eat at the cheap place often, again and again, and vote for it with real conviction, the way a restaurant collects thousands of five-star reviews on TripAdvisor simply because almost anyone can walk in. Far fewer can afford the expensive tasting menu even once, and far fewer still have ever been invited. It is not a comment on either kitchen’s quality but a comment on how many separate advantages one restaurant can accumulate while the other has almost none.
The Exception
Septime, in Paris, is one of the few real exceptions, and it is worth understanding why, because the reason is not simply “he did no PR.”
Bertrand Grébaut never hosted journalists for comped meals or a place on any list. He did not need to. He was in Paris, a city that pulls in more international critics, chefs and writers than almost anywhere else in the world, on its own gravity, and most importantly, he was deeply respected by other chefs, who make up a third of the vote in their own right. Peer respect is its own currency of visibility. It costs nothing in money, but it is not available to everyone either. A chef doing extraordinary work in a smaller city, without that professional network behind him, does not get the same lift. Septime filled every table within minutes of opening its books, purely on reputation. That is the proof that quality alone can carry a restaurant, when the circumstances around it are exceptional enough to win a third of the vote without paying for a single one of them. I believe Septime deserved every bit of that recognition, and I wish there were more restaurants like it on the list, not just in Paris, but in every city where a chef this good works without the budget to be seen.
The Vineyards
The World’s 50 Best Vineyards ranking tells much the same story, though the voting mechanics behind it are not quite identical.
Scroll through the top fifty, and it is mostly Champagne houses with global marketing budgets, historic Bordeaux estates, and corporate-owned wineries backed by drinks conglomerates. Vik in Chile is backed by serious private capital, built in part to be found. Bodega Garzón in Uruguay is a vast, heavily invested estate designed for international recognition from the start.
There are only a handful of small, independent producers on the list, and what most of them have in common is not obscurity but affordability. Good, honest wines that sell for twenty to thirty pounds a bottle get poured by the glass, bought by the case, tasted again and again by hundreds of voters who can actually afford to drink them regularly. But it raises a real question: where are the small, more exclusive producers making spectacular wine at a higher price, without a Champagne house’s marketing budget behind them? One of the founding figures of the entire natural wine movement, working in a different Italian region for more than four decades, sells for closer to a hundred a bottle, and he is not on the list. That gap is the whole story, and it has nothing to do with talent. It is the same popularity contest as the restaurant story. A hundred-pound bottle from a small, low-volume producer, however revered, gets opened rarely and by a limited number of people; there simply is not enough of it to go round. That is different from a big Champagne house or a corporate-owned estate, which can be expensive and still widely tasted, because it is made by the million rather than by the thousand. Decades of influence among people who take wine seriously do not translate into the volume of hands-on familiarity this kind of voting rewards, unless the producer is large enough to manufacture that familiarity through sheer supply. The gap sits between the bottle almost everyone has drunk and the bottle almost everyone has only heard about, and that is exactly where some of the most serious small producers in the world quietly lose the vote.
One small producer on the list breaks that pattern entirely, and the reason turns out to be closer to the restaurant story than it first looks. Its wines sell for upwards of £700 a bottle, well past even the natural wine legend mentioned above, deep into serious collector territory, and it still ranks near the top. What carried it there was not affordability. Its winemaker trained at some of Burgundy’s most revered estates, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, before coming home to run the family vineyard, exactly the kind of credential the wine world’s own voters recognise and respect on sight. It is peer respect again, the same mechanism that carried Septime, just wearing a different label.
The Question
None of this makes the World’s 50 Best worthless. It makes it something narrower than what it claims to be. Not a ranking of the best restaurants, bars, hotels and vineyards in the world. A ranking of the best-known ones, among people whose knowledge is shaped, more than anyone likes to admit, by who paid to be known or is accessible enough for the masses.
The list can keep doing real good, sending travellers to places they would never have found, while also measuring something other than quality. Both things are true at once. The dishonesty was never in the list itself. It is in calling it “best,” when everyone inside the industry already knows what it actually measures: who can afford to be seen.
Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.