Restaurants in Peru, Spain, Mexico, and Denmark claimed the top spots on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2025, revealed in Turin. In addition to the high-profile award ceremony on June 19th, the city hosted numerous events in the days surrounding the main event. Per Styregård highlights some presentations and honors from this year’s edition which are focusing on gastronomic diversity.
Photo: Celele, The Sustainable Restaurant Award 2025 by World’s 50 Best Restaurant
”…And the winner is … Maido!
This year’s announcement of the winner of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants was followed by a huge cheer from the 500 people or so in the Lingotto, the impressive former Fiat factory in Turin. Restaurant Maido, headed by chef Mitsuharu Micha Tsumura and pastry chef Dalila Sifuentes, combining Japanese techniques with Peruvian ingredients, had made it all the way to the top.
Runner up for the second year in a row was the iconic barbecue destination Asador Etxebarri in the Basque country.
From the Nordic countries, Copenhagen restaurant Alchemist climbed even closer to the top, claiming an amazing 5th place this year. Restaurant Frantzén, in Stockholm, came in at #38, making it onto the list for an impressive 10th time. New Nordic entries in the top 50 were restaurant Kadeau in Copenhagen at #41 and Vyn in Skåne at #47.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list is based on 1,120 anonymous voters spread across the world. Each person voting names the ten restaurants they think are the best and which they have visited during the past 18 months. The voters are selected by 28 Academy Chairs, responsible for a specific geographic area. Each chairperson selects 40 anonymous voters from their region, of which 50 percent are women and 50 percent men. 25 percent of the voters must be renewed each year.
The awards ceremony takes place in a different location each year. In the days leading up to the actual ceremony, several events are organized by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants team, the host city, and independent restaurants in the area.
One of the assets of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization is the collective knowledge of its 28 Academy Chairs, each of whom possesses deep insight into the restaurant scenes of the regions they represent. In the days leading up to the awards ceremony, the Chairs hold a dedicated meeting to update one another on developments in their respective regions. During this session, they share the latest news and trends shaping the global restaurant landscape.
Academy Chair in the northern part of South America, food writer Paola Miglio, who covers Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, reported that four of the world’s top 10 most biodiverse countries are in this region. Three of them – Peru, Colombia and Ecuador – have the highest concentration of altitudinal zones, exhibiting a wide variety of ecosystems due to the large differences in elevation.
“This biodiversity is one of the reasons behind strong resistance to GMOs in Peru, where genetically modified seeds are officially banned. There are no large estates (latifundios), but small-scale, ancestral agricultural communities.”
Miglio highlights how Peruvian food culture is evolving with the development of the cultural and gastronomic district of Barranco in Lima. She also brings up the “Virgilio effect”, referring to the pioneering chef Virgilio Martinez, whose Lima restaurant Central was the first in South America to top the The World’s 50 Best list.
In Colombia, Paola Maglio points out that cities like Bogotá, Medellín and Cartagena are becoming gastronomic hubs.
“The country is combining haute cuisine with traditional sazón, making Colombian flavors more visible globally.”
Food writer and editor Crystyl Mo, the Academy Chair for Mainland China, raised the question of why there are no internationally famous Chinese chefs, despite the numerous and incredibly rich Chinese food cultures. Mo proposed a number of possible reasons for this, one being the low status of being a chef in China, another being the language barrier. Many Chinese chefs are not proficient in English, which is almost necessary in order to thrive on the international restaurant stage.
Also, there’s a tradition of keeping your recipes secret in Chinese gastronomy, preventing great dishes and ideas to be passed on to others. Finally, Mo notes that Chinese tourist organizations have not promoted Chinese cuisine and invited international media to the same extent as some other countries.
However, there’s a new generation of Chinese chefs who have worked in the USA and Europe, some having graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in New York City, and then returned to China for work. Two examples of promising, exciting restaurants are Avant and Ensue in the city of Shenzhen.
For the Academy Vice Chair of Mainland China, Yang Guang, who runs a cooking channel on social media, one of the most important trends on the restaurant scene is the increased use of technology.
Technological solutions have become increasingly common, such as digital systems for ordering and paying for food, robots that deliver food to restaurant tables or hotel rooms, automation of kitchen work, and advanced food/merchandise delivery infrastructure that reduce waiting times of orders within the same city to 30-45 minutes.
Yang also points out that nationally, more Chinese cities now have an exciting and broad range of restaurants that serve new and refined cuisine. In addition to Shanghai and Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Chengdu, and Guangzhou, already rich in food culture and traditions, also have a very strong fine-dining scene.
Another development is the increased visibility of smaller regional culinary traditions with lesser-known ingredients. They have been made accessible to more people through a combination of increased internet access, better transportation, logistics and infrastructure. Concrete examples are the Xinrongji restaurant group who owns multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, spreading the knowledge of Taizhou cuisine from Zhejiang province, on the Eastern coast. Another restaurant, Meet the Bund in Shanghai, is featuring Fujianese cuisine, a style of cooking that combines ingredients and techniques from both mountains and the sea, rooted in the Southern Chinese province of Fujian.
The Benelux Academy Chair, restaurant critic and food journalist Femke Vandevelde, identified a strong cultural divide in the way restaurants are run in her region. In the Netherlands and Luxemburg, most restaurants are run by larger groups and corporations, while in Belgium, more restaurants are started and run by independent chefs.
Also, general trends on the restaurant scene in the region are the return of a la carte menus, a renewed interest in artisanal craft, a revival of innovative, plant-forward dishes, and recently opened restaurants choosing a more creative, avant-garde approach to cooking.
Vandevelde also mentioned the North Sea Chefs, a collective of one hundred Belgian and Dutch chefs collaborating under the guiding principle “We have to eat the fish we catch”. The group are raising awareness of the fact that almost half of the fish caught locally in the North Sea is bycatch, consisting of lesser-known or less sought-after fish. Since about 60 percent of fish consumption in Belgium is salmon and cod, the North Sea Chefs are working to increase demand and consumption of Belgian-caught bycatch, in restaurants, catering and public kitchens.
Another project making social responsibility one of its main focuses is Instroom in Antwerp, run by Seppe Nobels and Charuwan Pauwels. They train newcomers and refugees in kitchen and language skills, and to create new “Belgian” classic dishes based on their own native family recipes.
In addition to the annual ranking of 50 top restaurants, there are several individual awards to keep track of. This year’s Champion of Change is the Bundjalung chef Mindy Woods, of Karkalla restaurant in Byron Bay. The Bundjalung people are Aboriginal Australians living in the northeastern part of New South Wales and southeastern part of Queensland.
In Turin, Woods gave a heart-warming presentation during the 50 Best Talks about her cooking, which she does not call personal, but ancestorial.
“My first memories of food belong to the beaches of Bundjalung country. My grandmother was born in a time when she wasn’t allowed to speak her language, and she was forbidden to practicing her culture. So, she found gentle and powerful ways of showing us where we were from. She raised 17 children in a three-bedroom home in flood country in north Brisbane. You can imagine how much food it takes to feed 17 children! She would go out in the country and harvest the maiden spinach, the fresh water mussels. My mother grew up on seafood, mud crab, crustaceans, mullet … she was very spoiled.”
The understanding of Bundjalung land and its rich biodiversity was passed on to Woods from her grandmother and mother. She started Karkalla in 2020.
“My restaurant wasn’t just about serving native Australian food, it was about trying to give people an opportunity to experience the culture that inspired and shaped my life.”
Realizing that her cooking did not belong inside four walls, in 2024 she took the restaurant out into nature, calling it Karkalla On Country. For the guests, it’s not only a meal but a several-hours-long deep dive into nature and culture.
“We are so lucky. It’s a story that’s largely untold, but we have 6500 ingredients in the native land we now call Australia.”
The Sustainable Restaurant Award is given to the restaurant that achieves the highest environmental and social responsibility rating as determined by UK-based Sustainable Restaurant Association, the audit partner of The World’s 50 Best. This year, the award was given to restaurant Celele, located in Cartagena on Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast.
Restaurant Celele and its owner-chef Jaime Rodríguez celebrate native ingredients and support local communities. The menu is particularly inspired by the northern part of the country, and is partly based on a project chef Rodríguez has been running, Proyecto Caribe Lab. This research project aims to rediscover the edible biodiversity of the Colombian Caribbean by surveying the territory and cataloguing products, recipes, and techniques.
London-based restaurant Ikoyi, ranked at #15, climbed more places than any other restaurant from last year, earning it the Highest Climber Award. During his presentation at the 50 Best Talk, Ikoyi chef Jeremy Chan explained why he cooks, what Ikoyi is and is not, and how he thinks about flavor and spice.
“If you view Ikoyi as a West African restaurant, you’re missing the point. It’s neither a West African restaurant, nor a Cantonese nor French one. It exists to express the totality of my life experience – what is within – rather than aiming to recreating a single tradition. To me flavor is simply the output of my life’s journey. The output of my current state of being.”
Today, there’s a lot of focus on sourcing ingredients, on seasonality, and bringing out the true taste of the produce. Chan puts just as much importance on flavor.
“When we opened in 2017, I knew the restaurant embarked on a challenging and risky journey of flavor. I wanted to create a restaurant that used spices and bold meats as a catalyst to creativity.”
Spice is at the very heart of Chan’s cooking.
“To me, spice is more than flavor. It represents the spectra of cultures, histories of people around the world, the transference of ideas, languages, secrets, and myths. While there are many forms of magic in cooking – that perfect turbot, roasting steak in foaming butter – cooking with spice goes to the heart of that passion.”
Chan says he’s never tasted a single dish at his restaurant since they opened, nor has he ever eaten there.
“It would be like eating a part of myself.”
Nor does he believe in R&D, testing and practicing dishes. The reason he cooks is to see others enjoying the food.
But the constant pressure to define the cuisine and concept at Ikoyi, and to explain his cooking, can affect the creative process in long run.
“The best flavors I’ve ever created would be from the first years of opening the restaurant. I didn’t care what anyone else thought at the time. I was combative. The more people told me who I was, the more people were trying to define my flavors, the more I would dig inside, trying to pull something out that was unpredictable and true to my emotions. But as you get older, you start to listen to what others think and like, and this begins to affect your creative process, and your ideas lose their integrity.”
When the days in Turin and the award ceremony of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants were over, it was back to work for all the participants. The search for next year’s laureates has already started. Lacking any predetermined checklist of criteria for the 1,120 voters to follow, The World’s 50 Best can ideally continue to inspire chefs to really do their own thing, without listening to what others like.
Also, please, Jeremy Chan, stay true to your vision and continue doing your magic with spices at Ikoyi.
Per Styregård
Academy Chair for World’s 50 Best Scandinavia & Baltics, and co-founder of Circular Gastronomy Challenge.