According to the La Liste ranking, Japan and China have more number of world's best restaurants than anywhere else. The French-based list will declare Guy Savoy's flagship Paris riverside restaurant best in the world for the second year running. French cooking dominates the top 100; the big trend is the climb of Chinese haute cuisine. "The rise and rise of China is the big story," Jorg Zipprick, who crunched the numbers for the "guide of guides", which was set up as a "more scientific and reliable" rival three years ago to the British-based 50 Best Restaurants was quoted in a report in AFP. Japan still dominates the country table with 138 restaurants in the top 1,000 of the French classification, but China is closing the gap fast with 123.
"Up to now China has been one of the most difficult countries to get data from," Zipprick told AFP, but a boom in local gastronomic guides has changed all that. "Asia has a lot more restaurants than Europe and it is only logical that La Liste will reflect that," he added.
Tokyo restaurant Kyubey, whose sushi is renowned for being extraordinary and reasonably priced, took the third spot after Le Bernardin, a New York fish restaurant. Two restaurants in the Japanese capital made to top 20, followed by highest placed Chinese restaurant, the Huai Yang Fu at Andingmen in Beijing.
The Summit of the list did not see a dramatic change, but there were three new-comers to the top 10 that also included The French Laundry. Another big climber was Aponiente at the other end of Spain and the Andalusian fish specialist in El Puerto de Santa Maria jumped 200 places on the back of getting a third Michelin star.
La Liste's aggregator of the 1,000 top-rated restaurants in the world is modelled on the world tennis rankings and the Shanghai Ranking for universities. While Japan, China, France and the United States top the league for having the highest number of best restaurants, Switzerland with 38 for a population of eight million, has the highest per capital rating.
Superstar chef Gordon Ramsay's flagship London restaurant remained the highest-rated British table, pipping L'Enclume, which operates in a former blacksmith's forge in Cumbria, northwest England. This year's winners will be formally announced at a banquet in Paris on Monday, with 40 of the world's leading chefs also invited to meet French President Emmanuel Macron at his Elysee Palace residence.
With Inputs from AFP