Valencia, the Spanish city on the Mediterranean Sea perhaps best known for its oranges and for twice having hosted the prestigious America’s Cup for sailing, added another accolade to its gastronomy and tourism laurels this week, when it hosted the 2023 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards.
The city, the third largest in Spain, saw its ranks swell this week with the influx of chefs, restaurateurs and industry professionals from all over the globe for a series of private dinners, events and a star-studded gala at the city’s City of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday evening.
The World’s 50 Best, administered by media company William Reed, is based in London but has moved its annual awards ceremony in the past to New York, Melbourne, the Basque Country, Singapore and Antwerp. “Our revenue model is based entirely on sponsorship and that includes support from a host destination,” says William Drew, director of content for the awards. The Valencia regional tourism authorities invested just over €1 million in bringing the glitzy event to the city.
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Having hosted the prestigious America’s Cup sailing competition twice before, in 2007 and 2010, Valencia decided in 2021 not to mount a bid to host the 2024 event, and Barcelona’s pitch was successful. “You need a lot of public money to host the America’s Cup and the authorities considered it was not the moment to make such a big investment,” a spokesperson for Visit Valencia says. The public purse strings were loosened however for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which is a good fit for a city with a strong culinary tradition.
With pandemic restrictions no longer a concern, it was business as usual for the World’s 50 Best this year, with chefs, restaurateurs and sponsors flying to Valencia from across the globe. But Ireland, where the gastronomy scene is now stronger than it has ever been before, was not represented, either in the top 50 or the 51-100 list announced in advance of this week’s gala. Not since 2003, when Kevin and Muriel Thornton’s now shuttered Thornton’s restaurant in Dublin entered the list at number 25, has an Irish restaurant featured in this listing.
The World’s 50 Best list rivals the Michelin Guide as a global benchmark for fine dining, and Irish restaurants feature prominently in the guide’s UK and Ireland edition, so why has the Irish restaurant scene been bypassed by the World’s 50 Best for the past two decades?
“The people that vote for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are not necessarily going to take a particular note of whether someone has a star or not,” Drew says. “But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t fantastic restaurants in Ireland.”
However there is a caveat. “Are enough people travelling to Ireland from the rest of the world to sample these restaurants, because you need to get enough word of mouth, enough excitement about a restaurant, that they start becoming destinations in their own right, in order to make it on to the list?”
So who are these people whose opinion forms the basis of the influential World’s 50 Best? The list is compiled based on the votes of 1,080 restaurant industry representatives worldwide, split into 27 regions, each of which has 40 members including a chairperson. Ireland is grouped with the UK, and the voting panel is chaired by food writer and author Xanthe Clay.
Members of the voting panel, made up equally of chefs and restaurateurs, food writers, and what the list describes as “well-travelled gourmets”, must remain anonymous. Each has 10 votes, not more than six of which can be cast for restaurants within their own region.
In response to queries about Ireland’s representation on the UK and Ireland voting panel, Drew says: “Xanthe is very scrupulous about ensuring that each of the regions, including Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, has a proportionate number of voters to the population. Certainly since I’ve been around there has always been Irish representation in terms of the voters.”
Not everyone rates the relevance of the World’s 50 Best list. Russ Parsons, former food editor of the LA Times, now an Irish Times Magazine columnist, describes it as “an exercise for people who like to argue over postmodern cuisine”, and says “Ireland just isn’t on the foodie ‘heat map’ yet, so it gets left out”.
Unlike the Michelin inspectors, who book anonymously and pay their bill in full, the World’s 50 Best has a less stringent code of practice. Anonymity is not a requirement and voters can be a guest of the restaurant or of another party. “We don’t insist on a person paying the bill, or even an employer paying the bill [in the case of a critic]. We trust our voters to make an independent judgment on their dining experience,” Drew says. They must, however, have dined at the restaurants they are nominating within the previous 18 months, and are asked to confirm this.
The World’s 50 Best list does not officially legislate for a restaurant’s reputation as an employer in making its decisions, unlike the James Beard Foundation in the United States, which has taken the decision to remove from consideration for its awards those chefs who it deems to have acted in contravention of its ethics code and its values of respect, transparency, diversity, sustainability and equality.
“We would love to ensure that the restaurants on our list have impeccable reputation, but I think that is beyond our control and remit in reality,” Drew says. “We certainly do not want to promote restaurants where they’re led by individuals with either a bad reputation or are not upholding the standards that one would expect in this industry, but how one polices that is a huge challenge in itself. So what we say to our voters is please do take what you know about this restaurant, the reputation of how it operates and how it treats its staff into account when making your judgments.”
Perhaps because of the secrecy surrounding the voting panel members, and the often controversial line up of inclusions, and what some might see as glaring omissions, the World’s 50 Best is not without its detractors. Several alternative worldwide restaurant rankings, such as France’s La Liste, and Opinionated About Dining, based in the US, have sprung up. In 2019, a rival World’s Best Restaurants list, with a more irreverent approach to restaurant rankings – there were categories for least tattooed chef, for example – had its initiation. But it became a casualty of the pandemic and did not have a reprise.
In Valencia, it appeared that all was well with the restaurant industry, as hundreds of guests flocked to the city’s Calatrava-designed City of Arts and Sciences for a lavish black-tie cocktail reception and slick awards ceremony at the opera house.
Those who were there to see the Peruvian restaurant Central move up to pole position, with Spanish stalwarts Disfrutar, DiverXO and Asador Etxebarri filling the next three places, seemed happy to be there and to be part of the occasion. Whether or not Ireland will rejoin the “club” in the future remains to be seen.
