Column: Why there isn't a best chef in the world

In victory, top chefs are much like the classiest of professional tennis players: self-deprecatory, admiring of their rivals, grateful to their teachers. A few weeks ago, just after his restaurant Maido was proclaimed No. 1 among the 50 Best Restaurants in the World at a ceremony in Turin, Italy, Mitsuharu Tsumura told me, “There is competition, but when you finish, you shake hands, you have a beer.”

Unlike tennis and other sports, though, the world of haute cuisine doesn’t really have a universally recognized ranking system like the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association. For those who point to the Michelin Guide, I will politely say the French tire company provides ratings not rankings. The 50 Best franchise certainly provides a glitzy showcase for some of the finest eating establishments in the world, but it’s incomprehensive. The list has lots of Latin American representation, like Maido in Peru, but sparse North American luminaries. (One of my favorites, Atomix in New York City, placed 12th this year, dropping six spots; the next U.S. restaurant isn’t even in the top 50: Single Thread in Healdsburg, California, at 80.)

Once upon a time, the best chef in the world was whoever was at the top of the French culinary universe. Paul Bocuse — who died in 2018 and whose name is enshrined in the Bocuse D’Or cooking competition in his native Lyon — was perhaps the most infallible of these culinary arbiters of fine dining. However, for about a three-decade span — from the very end of the 20th century to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic — there was wide consensus that two non-French cooks were the world’s most influential chefs. For the first half of the period, it was Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Spain. For the second half, it was Rene Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen. Their primacy is reflected in the history of the 50 Best: Adria has won the top spot five times; Redzepi has done it four times. In 2019, the organization changed its rules, automatically promoting all past and future top-notchers into a “Best of the Best” hall of fame. It was a way of getting new restaurants into the rankings while assuaging the older guard with apotheosis.

The reform was a polite way to freshen up the list, but it unwittingly reflects a real change in the nature of the culinary world, one effected by the legacies of Adria and Redzepi. Let me summarize it by way of an anecdote.

During a dinner, the Spanish chef, who is a friend, turned to me with one of the terrifying restaurant history questions he likes to hurl at friend and foe alike. Get the answer right and you are golden. Get it wrong and you’ll get an hourlong lecture to set you right.

“What is the greatest lesson of El Bulli?” he asked me.

Fortunately, a couple of months before, I had heard the answer — from Rene Redzepi. The Dane, whom I also consider a friend, had worked briefly in Adria’s kitchen and has feted the Spaniard on his birthday at Noma. And so, I repeated what I’d learned: “The most important rule of El Bulli is that there are no rules.” Adria smiled approvingly and I got no lecture.

Adria dethroned the French as world champions with his genre-busting kitchen techniques; and Redzepi pushed the revolution further by turning Nordic notions into haute cuisine, further showing everyone that their local cuisines too could become global standard-bearers. You didn’t have to be French — or Spanish or Danish.

Today, I find it quite moving that among the James Beard Awards and nominations for best restaurants in the various U.S. regions were establishments serving Filipino, Tamil, Thai, Korean, Mexican, Vietnamese and a host of other non-European cuisines. It’s also inspiring that one of the chefs who got the most attention at the Turin ceremony was Pichaya Soontornyanakij and her restaurant Potong in Bangkok. Ikoyi, the highest-placed London restaurant at 15, has its roots in West African cooking. A quick round of interviews with top contenders for the 50 Best revealed a consensus for the cuisines with increasing global influence: Mexican, Chinese, Korean and Indian. It’s going to be hard to figure on parameters that will allow you judge whether the wok hei technique of a Hong Kong chef is better than the bhuna caramelization of a top restaurant in Mumbai.

Even as all this decentralization continues, the world of chefs seems to be settling into two semi-ideological camps. Or perhaps the word is egocentric. The 50 Best appears to be a favorite annual stop of Adria; his disciples have followed. Meanwhile, a more nebulous but just as influential group gathers around Redzepi, who not only has been taking Noma around the world (Kyoto last year; Los Angeles next) but also this year revived the MAD Symposium, which was legendary in the 2010s for allowing chefs to voice big and deep thoughts. Both men continue to project their authority and personality onto a cooking universe without a center of gravity.

But chefs still like prizes — especially those with the label “best.” I started this column with tennis players. If you believe that they are as gracious in private as their victorious personas on the podium, well, you haven’t been watching enough matches with the athletes grunting, growling and scowling. Chefs share the same passions and instincts. This year at the 50 Best, a popular expectation was that the No. 1 spot would go to Bittor Arginzoniz’s Asador Etxebarri in Spain’s Basque country. Maido, with its celebration of Peru’s Japanese immigrant Nikkei cuisine, has been working its way up the list for years, but Etxebarri, with its innovative grilling, has been one of the most influential restaurants in the world for a long time. Its chef is also famously fiery and competitive. So, despite his smiling demeanor in Turin, he was probably unhappy that the restaurant came in at No. 2. One foodie friend — who asked not to be named because he knows too many sensitive chefs — quipped that “Bittor is probably so mad at the snub that he’s only going to make Etxebarri better than ever, just to show everyone up. Better book a table now.”

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine.