The "influential" British publication "Restaurant Magazine" published its annual Top 50 establishments yesterday, to a chorus of boos here as only 5 French restaurants figure in the list, and none in the top 10. Maybe they have a point as the top choices regularly include Can Celler in Gerona (no.1), Noma in Copenhagen, The Fat Duck in England, where the chefs have made their innovative style of cooking and presentation ostensibly more important than actual quality and taste. One French chef said the method of selection lent weight to the "cool and tattooed" celebrity chefs.
Indeed there is an on-line petition calling for the magazine to open up its "opaque" selection methods, ending what it claims to be "cronyism".
A French magazine "Le Chef" polled 500+ Michelin starred chefs to rate not restaurants, but their colleagues and unsurprisingly 6 of the top 10 chefs are French. One leading Paris chef did concede that the restaurants rated in the Top 50 had "something to teach us about innovation and presentation", because at a restaurant we are not just interested in eating well.
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