Selected by the largest, most internationally diverse panel yet, with 22 voting regions worldwide, Restaurant magazine presents the list everyone's been waiting for...The Worlds 50 Best Restaurants
How we did it
The academy system of voting that we introduced last year remains largely unchanged this year. To recap: in 2006 we divided the world up into different voting regions and appointed a chairperson for each region, each of whom, in turn, nominated a voting panel for their region. These panels were formed of chefs, restaurateurs and food critics. Each regional chair and each panel member was asked to vote for five restaurants, with the condition that they could only vote for a maximum of two restaurants within their own region.
This year, in an attempt to improve the diversity of the panel, we introduced two new voting regions in Asia to bring the total number of voting panels up to 22. There were 651 voters in total this year and 3,255 votes were cast.
The only other new stipulation this year was that all restaurants voted for this year all had to have been visited by the voters in the last 18 months.
As was the case last year, on the rare occasions when restaurants were tied with the same number of votes, the votes from their home region were discounted, and were any restaurants still tied for position, we then gave preference to the restaurant that had votes spread across the largest number of regions.