The World’s 50 Best Restaurants for this year were recently announced, but how exactly are they fairly adjudicated, especially in pandemic times

Imagine the voting members for the Oscars not having watched many of the new films they voted for or for the Grammys’ voting committee having listened to only a few of the nominated songs in the months before they vote and you have, perhaps, in the world of food, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards 2021. Somehow these awards have been so well marketed that The Guardian acclaims that they are “widely considered the Oscars of gastronomy”.

Congratulations to the organizers for pulling off this impressive feat and congratulations to Copenhagen for getting the top two restaurants for 2021. Thailand managed one in the Top 50, with Suhring coming in at number 40, and for those that took the trouble to delve down to the 51-100 listed, Sorn comes in at 63 and Le Du at 72. Again, congratulations to all three. 

The awards are organized and compiled by William Reed Business Media in the UK and they have acknowledged the difficulties in compiling a list during Covid-19 times, when travel is restricted and reviewers are not able to visit restaurants outside their region, as required by the voting rules. These rules allow that “voters remain anonymous and the process strictly confidential” with 26 regions around the world and 40 voters in each, giving 10 votes each, up to six from their own region and at least four outside. If you are interested you can see how it is done here.

One thing that caught my eye was that business partner to the awards, Deloitte, audits the process each year and claims when there is a “significant variance in any region” (whatever that might be), they apply a “ normalization process” to the numbers. If, like me, you might wonder what such a thing might be, normalizationprocess.org will set you right perhaps.

I cannot help thinking this is all gobbledygook and set up to put an enormous smokescreen around whatever is going on. Nonetheless, the restaurant industry really needs a good boost at this time and thanks go to this list for at least helping those selected.