How is a restaurant really better than the others? The question was asked by the French Philippe Faure, patron of the Gault & Millau guide and president of Atout France, the transalpine agency for tourism development, and to settle the disputes between the infinite variety of cuisine and the different standards of quality, in addition to obviously subjective tastes, he relied on technology. Faure thus launched a year ago the La Liste app, to whose algorithm he entrusted a titanic job: scour the restaurants of 180 countries of the world (practically all) by cross-referencing data from the most authoritative food guides with critical articles, the opinions of the most influential food bloggers and reviews from specialized sites. To give a parameter, La Liste 2019 presented a year ago scanned 628 guides and over 56 million reviews.
A "meta-classification" came out of it, which obviously shouldn't be taken literally and which, for example, closely resembles that drawn up by the ATP for tennis. And so it happens that at number one there is not necessarily the one considered strongest, for example by The World's 50 Best Restaurant, and it is not even said that it is a chef decorated with three Michelin stars. The 2020 Liste is unveiled on December 2 in Paris but in the meantime it has emerged from the previews that the algorithm really likes Asian cuisine, especially Japanese: 4 positions of the top 9 (the nine "world champions", whose score is equal to or greater than 99 points), "spoiled" in preview by the French newspaper Les Echos, are occupied by Japanese restaurants.
These are Nihonryori Ryugin and Sugalabo, both from Tokyo, and then Kitcho Arashiyama in Kyoto and Saito Sushi in Minato-Ku. Three French restaurants invariably complete the Top-9: one in Monaco, actually, that of Alain Ducasse, and then the Guy Savoy Monnaie of Paris, which has the highest rating of all tied with the two Tokyo venues and the Bernardine of New York, by the transalpine chef Eric Ripert. The other French is L'Arpège by Alain Passard in Paris, while Spanish also appears in the ranking of excellence Martín Berasategui. Therefore, the absence of Italian restaurants stands out, as well as the Italian-Argentinian Mauro Colagreco, winner of the World's 50 Best with his Mirazur in Menton. On the other hand, the best restaurant in Rome is confirmed to be Heinz Beck's Pergola.
Japanese cuisine – again according to the La Liste algorithm – also dominates the ranking of the top 1.000, with 148 restaurants, ahead of France which has 120. The previews of Les Echos reveal nothing about the positions of Italians, but last year the best was considered Le Calandre by the Alajmo brothers, in the province of Padua, with 98,75 points, therefore close to the very first positions. Finally, in the ranking that will be unveiled on 2 December, the almost absence of women stands out: already in the 50 Best Restaurant there were only 5 chefs, even on La Liste there don't seem to be too many even if among the first 1.000 there will be big names such as American Melissa Rodriguez and her Del Posto in New York, Turkish Aylin Yazicioglu and South African Chantel Dartnall, with her Mosaic in Pretoria.
