The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list was announced last night, and once again, Alinea was Chicago’s sole representative.
Alinea was ranked 34th on the 2018 list, down from 21st last year and 15th the year before that. Alinea’s best finishes were in 2011 and 2012, when it was ranked 6th and 7th, respectively. (The only other Chicago restaurant ever to appear on the list was Charlie Trotter’s.)
But it has ever been thus with the World’s 50 Best, which was first produced in 2002 by Restaurant Magazine, a British trade magazine that solicits votes from 1,000 fine-dining experts from around the world (disclosure: I voted this year and in several past years).
According to Skift, a travel and restaurant industry publication, “Restaurant Magazine is still around, but (parent company) William Reed (Business Media) has since spun off the World’s 50 Best as its own event not tied to any of the company’s publications … According to … filings, in recent years, William Reed has made a concerted effort to move away from relying on its traditional print magazines as the business’s main source of revenue and instead invest heavily in the more profitable events category.” The awards have been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism in the past few years for its Euro-centric list (Eater’s 2016 report shows that 50 percent of the list features European restaurants, and the 2017 program failed to include Africa, India and the Middle East entirely — hardly representative of the world) plus a glaring lack of gender diversity among its ranking restaurants.
Restaurants rise and fall; The French Laundry, which was No. 1 in 2003 and 2004, didn’t make the 50 Best at all, instead ranked 86th (World’s 50 Best also includes a secondary list of restaurants ranked from 51-100.)
Up at the top, there was some minor shuffling this year. Osteria Francescana (Modena, Italy) returned to the top spot after falling to 2nd last year. Eleven Madison Park (New York), last year’s No. 1, was fourth, and El Celler de Can Roca (Girona, Spain) and Mirazur (Menton, France) each moved up a spot to claim 2nd and 3rd, respectively.
See the complete list here.
The list was announced at a ceremony in Bilbao, Spain.
pvettel@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @PhilVettel
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