Sick of ‘world’s best’ lists? Here’s why they’re actually useful

I used to think the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list was pretty silly. How can you possibly quantify something so subjective? How can you hope to assess every single decent restaurant in the world, a grouping so wildly diverse and idiosyncratic, and then tally them neatly in a list of the top 50?

The answer is that you can’t. Obviously. This is someone’s idea of the 50 best restaurants in the world, but it’s not everyone’s. It’s barely anyone’s.

You might come to Lima for Virgilio Martinez’s fine diner Central, but you will return again and again for the rich array of restaurants across the city.

So I used to think, what’s the point? All the dishes at all the top-ranked restaurants end up looking the same anyway, regardless of where they’ve been cooked and created. These restaurants are all serving European-style multi-course set menus. They’re all basically impossible to book, too, and impossibly expensive if you do get a booking.

But after a while I’ve come to realise the list’s value. It’s not so much “the” World’s 50 Best – it’s more like “a” World’s 50 Best. And that’s fine. It’s someone’s idea of the world’s best restaurants, in the same way Michelin is someone’s idea of great restaurants, or Gault & Millau is, or Gambero Rosso is, or the absolute crapshoot of Google and TripAdvisor reviews are.

These organisations and websites make up just a small part of a large amount of information available to travellers which they can use to come up with their own preferences, their own decisions of where to eat when they’re on the road.

Anyway, who doesn’t love a list? Rolling Stone’s Greatest Guitarists of All Time? Yes please. The New York Times’ list of Best Books Released This Century? I’ll look at it. The Guardian’s 100 Best Male and Female Footballers? Absolutely.

Disfrutar in Barcelona was named the world’s best restaurant at this year’s World’s 50 Best awards.Credit: Getty Images

As someone who has written many a subjective list for the internet’s approval and/or hatred, I can hardly criticise. Plus, part of the fun of lists are the disagreements.

Does anyone really think England star Jude Bellingham is the second-best footballer on the planet? Or that Metallica’s Kirk Hammett deserves to be anywhere near the top 25 guitarists of all time? Or, while we’re here, that a middling Argentinian steakhouse is the 10th best restaurant on the entire planet?

Surely not.

All of this, of course, brings us around to the inaugural Traveller Awards, and they may seem subjective. Someone’s idea of brilliance in the travel sphere may not entirely align with your own.

But that’s the beauty of awards and lists. They’re often collated, as these are, by experts in the field with a wealth of experience and knowledge – but that doesn’t mean everyone has to agree.

We all come at these things with our own sets of priorities and desires. We all see value and beauty in different experiences. Travel, like food, is highly subjective, often influenced by singular events that will never be repeated.

The way I use the 50 Best restaurants list now is to inform as part of a whole. I might not want to visit every restaurant on the list, but I can definitely scan it and see that there are, say, four eateries from Bangkok on the list right now, and three from Mexico City. Clearly, there’s something going on in those cities that is inventive and exciting. These are destinations I want to check out, to sample everything from those fine diners to the casual restaurants to the street food.

The 50 Best list fired my desire to visit Peru last year – have you noticed how many Peruvian restaurants keep popping up, time and time again? – and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Who knew there was such a deeply ingrained culture of cuisine in a country far better known for Incan ruins? I chatted to a chef in Lima who explained the local psyche, that you will always know Peruvians when they’re travelling because the first thing they will ask you is where you’ve been eating. When Peruvians are having breakfast, she said, they will be talking about lunch; at lunch they’ll be considering dinner.

This is a level of obsession I hadn’t previously appreciated. And the 50 Best list is just the headline for Peru, the hook to get you in. You might come to Lima for Virgilio Martinez’s fine diner Central, but you will return again and again for the rich array of restaurants across all price points that you soon discover in Lima and beyond.

That’s why I love a list. I love agreeing with a list; I love disagreeing with a list. I love filing away that information and using it later to influence my decisions, to decide how much I agree.

There’s nothing silly about that.