Monday, April 24, 2006

The best restaurants in the world

Restaurant Magazine has recently released its Top 50 list of the best restaurants in the world. I almost got to go #4 on the list, The French Laundry, which is in Northern California and was also the best one in the Americas. The top restaurant in the world in 2006 is El Bulli in Spain.

Now it's time to get all of their best recipes and get someone to make them for me (please). There was some criticism that the list was UK centric due to the number of London and UK restaurants on the list, and the fact that Restaurant Magazine is based in the United Kingdom. The histogram below (click to make larger) shows where most of the restaurants are located. It looks like France is the king (le Roi) of cuisine with 10 out of 50.


I wonder if the number of top restaurants should be correlated with population, if so Asia and South America are woefully underrepresented. Perhaps it would be by population of middle or upper class customers to patronize a top restaurant. That would seem to indicate that North America is underrepresented. Perhaps someday the rest of the world can hope to catch up to Europe and its fine restaurants, or the fine judges at Restaurant magazine need to travel the world some more.

Update: I am chagrined to notice that one restaurant is in Monaco, not Morocco as I thought, and thus Monaco is in Europe not in Africa (but Morocco is in Africa and without a top 50 restaurant). An update chart will appear when I have the opportunity. For now please shift that line over one location in your mind's eye Europe has 36 and Africa has 2 (plot is now correct, oops! Those are chef hats, by the way). Thanks to the Virtual Ranger for pointing this out, we really do know geography in the Unites States, we just can't read.

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2 comments:

The Virtual Ranger said...

Oh you statistician! You can always be relied upon to produce a graph. Most illuminating. I was interested to see such a lot of UK restaurants - none in my beloved Isle of Wight sadly - and if I might make a constructive criticism from this side of the Atlantic, you may find that Monaco is not in Africa.

whirdly said...

Now I'd like to see a graph on the average cost of dinner for two at each of these restaurants (with wine and tip included).