Prix 2022

Marseille has always been synonymous with bouillabaisse. But now it’s known for its variety, from pizzerias to casual joints and Tunisian or Moroccan spots, all the way to the finest of fine dining. In the past decade, a young and dynamic culinary scene has developed here, but the title of best bouillabaisse is still up for grabs, as ever!

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have always had a decidedly anti-gastronomic reputation. It’s time to bury this unfair and outdated image. There’s a lot going on in the Baltics, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia, Montenegro, and Northern Macedonia. Not only are talented chefs emerging, even if they’re not yet well known internationally, there’s also a traditional food culture built on quality, often unpolished but also unadulterated and full of authenticity. Get there before everyone else finds out!

Does Alain Ducasse ever take a break? In 2020 and 2021 alone he has opened a cookery school in Versailles, a luxury restaurant at the Versailles Grand Contrôle hotel, a plant-based restaurant, Sapid, an ice cream parlour, and collaborated with an international coffee brand. Some people imitate, others create. Alain Ducasse, of course, is one of the latter.

If any restaurant is truly of the moment, it’s Ark. Plant-based cooking, natural wines, and cocktails, locally sourced produce, zero waste, and a sustainable business model. All of it thought out in great detail. Banana peels are infused for cocktails, the mushrooms grown on an urban farm, the plates are from local makers, the lamps produced from seaweed and recycled paper. It looks great, tastes great, and it’s served without a sermon.

Feitoria chef João Rodrigues is the face behind Projecto Matéria. His goal is to give exposure to local farmers and producers through online database projectomateria.pt. The initiative showcases Portuguese terroir and everything about it which is special and sustainable. If you want to know where you can find tomatoes that still taste great, for example, you can trust Projecto Matéria. We hope it will inspire chefs in other countries.

The genius chef Santi Santamaria was Spain’s saint of great food, but we lost him too soon when he died in 2011 aged only 53. Universo Santi - Santi's world - is an attempt at managing his culinary legacy. It has a restaurant, of course, which is home to a unique school where disabled youngsters are taught cooking and hospitality. The great Catalan Santi would have been proud of this wonderful initiative.

Rodolfo Guzmán has spent 15 years exploring, preserving and preparing Chile’s indigenous flora and fauna for his Santiago restaurant, Boragó. To bring produce from as far afield as Patagonia and the Atacama Desert to his Santiago restaurant, he works with hundreds of foragers and micro producers, supporting traditional cultivation methods and protecting the environment. Water comes from rainwater, vegetables from Guzmán’s own local farm. This brings dishes it would be impossible to create anywhere else on earth, and it’s unlikely you’ve heard of many of the ingredients: loco, and pinatra, to name just a few.

Christophe Aribert has banned all single-use plastic from his restaurant. This rare decision, also taken by Mauro Colagreco's Mirazur, has forced him to study every last detail: paper is soaked in beeswax, there is less or no sous-vide cooking, and plenty of negotiation with each supplier so they don’t use plastic packaging. Even the laundry no longer arrives in plastic bags. Thank you, Chef, for setting this example.

With 2.5 million fans on TikTok and 53 million "likes", Diego Alary is a one-man bestseller who does more for cooking with his audience than most "easy" cookbooks. We're giving him the award for his success on TikTok, but we'd like to point out that he's much more than a social media phenomenon. He did, after all, learn his trade at Guy Savoy and the Plaza-Athénée.

An exciting new addition to the Mexican capital which digs deep into tradition. Chef Diana López del Rio leads her Mux research kitchen as a celebration of the country’s rich and diverse cuisine, highlighting lesser-known dishes and hopping from region to region depending on the season. This gives us a menu that’s both original and authentic. There’s rice mole from Jalisco, garnachitas from Oaxaca, and a mezcal list to impress even the most knowledgeable drinker. “Cooking is an act of kindness,” she says. “It is a lot of responsibility and based not only on the technique but on what that dish can generate in a person.”

A British chef in a French restaurant in Japan together give us one of 2021’s most elegant and sophisticated openings. Daniel Calvert launched Sézanne in the Four Seasons Tokyo in July and his reputation for precision-led French cuisine and flawless produce has translated across borders - he was previously at Hong Kong’s Belon - with ease. Calvert, who has also worked at Thomas Keller’s Per Se and Epicure in Paris, calls his food timeless rather than traditional, and mixes French essentials such as comté and Normandy butter with local venison, chicken and seafood.

Fi’lia is already successful in Miami and Nassau and its “honest Italian” cooking is breaking boundaries at its newest location in Dubai. Head chef Sara Aqel, 25, is Palestinian-Jordanian and trained in Italian cuisine under Massimo Bottura. At Fi’lia on the 70th floor of the hotel SLS Dubai, she’s bringing diners a story of real Italian womanhood - nonna, mamma and figlia - with rich and rustic flavours such as 18-hour veal ragu, vitello tonnato, and sea bass carpaccio. Pitched as the “region’s first female-led restaurant”, the team is 70% women. “Most of our grandmothers never had a platform where they could do it as a profession, earn from it, shine as stars in cooking. Their talent wasn’t taken seriously,” Aqel has said.

The latest restaurant from Arkady Novikov, an entrepreneur at the vanguard of Russia’s culinary landscape who owns over one hundred restaurants around the world. At Artest, chef Artem Estafiev uses Russian produce and fermentation to turn out modern food rooted in tradition. Dishes include Far Eastern crab with black quinoa and portobello mushrooms in carrot oil, followed by halibut and cauliflower in champagne sauce, then classic shoyu or filet mignon with parsley root, nettle, mustard, blackened vegetable glaze and beef garum. He also masters vegetarian cuisine with dishes such as oyster mushrooms and potato dumplings with cauliflower and guinea fowl egg yolk in a cheese sauce.

Let’s be up front: Plénitude is likely to climb very high indeed on La Liste in no time at all. Fish stock, caramelised lemon and lemon balm, ginger, dried plankton powder, aliotis juice, brown butter, oyster, lemon oil and wine vinegar...this isn’t even a dish but the description of the Number 9 broth that is served with turbot, sea potatoes, hazelnut and caviar. Arnaud Donckele, known from the Vague d'Or in Saint-Tropez, advances the “symphony of sauces” and his are outstanding - carefully devised, expertly crafted, truly refined. He deserves any success he finds; first because sauces are the soul of French cooking, secondly because there are books packed with forgotten sauce recipes, some based on fresh truffles or vintage Madeira, all ripe for rediscovery by Plénitude.

Tantris was the gourmet restaurant in Germany, a place where chefs such as Eckart Witzigmann, Heinz Winkler and Hans Haas first convinced Germans of the pleasures of fine dining. It went on to influence the tastes of at least two generations of gourmets across Germany and remains iconic in the country’s culinary history. Forced to reinvent itself after the chef's retirement, Tantris is banking on renewed success with the French cuisine of Virginie Protat. Her cooking is pure enjoyment, with finely crafted sauces and dishes prepared and sliced at the table. A true success!

The story behind this Maine restaurant sounds straight out of a romcom: a young woman divorces, becomes depressed and loses everything, moving to a trailer in her parents' backyard until she finds her future restaurant, an old mill, in a town called Freedom. She starts cooking, does well, and people from all over the world send her postcards to get a reservation. That’s right - they don't phone or email. If you want to try the halibut Niçoise, the bass with corn, cherry tomatoes and capers, or the polenta cake with grilled peach, honey and cream, you'd better sharpen your pencils. It might sound like the stuff of Hollywood, but it’s Erin French’s real life story. And you guessed it - the story was so good it’s been made into a TV series, on screens as of 2021.

How does he do it? We thought Jan-Hendrik van der Westhuizen was settled in Nice, France. We knew that South Africa had lost two of its best chefs, and that others had to switch concepts between lockdowns and opening restrictions. So M. van der Westhuizen has caught us off guard with this restaurant in the middle of the Kalahari desert, not far from a game reserve. At a time when few people are travelling, he’s giving us the ultimate culinary destination: a restaurant we explore by eating, but also by moving around the space, from a desert view to the farmhouse then the underground cellar, an Aladdin’s cave of dried and preserved local produce four meters under the sand. Expect expansive menus showcasing French expertise and carefully chosen South African ingredients.

Maori cuisine. Hiakai serves the cuisine of New Zealand’s indigenous people, though they call their home Aotearoa. As a child, chef Monique Fiso learned to cook with her Samoan grandmother, but what she turns out today has evolved far from those dishes. Though Fiso takes the core ingredients and techniques from her homeland, such as traditional cooking methods like the hāngi “earth oven”, the rest is all hers. You might say she is developing a modern version of Maori cooking.

Much more than a restaurant, FarmLore opened in summer 2021 on a 37-acre farm on the edge of Bangalore. It has not one but three famous chefs, led by Mythrayie Iyer, formerly of Noma. The mango and coconut farm has been developed to create a sustainable farm-to-plate dining experience and dishes depend on the harvest, perhaps Malabar scallops with local berries and ferns, pork belly with apricots, coorg coffee and charred greens, or barramundi with moringa and butter beans.

As if the Maldives aren’t a special enough location, Fresh in the Garden brings you the most spectacular mise en scène of any restaurant, with diners seated high above the Soneva Fushi gardens around a central open kitchen, like a magical treehouse in the treetops. Danish chef Mads Refslund is currently there for a 12-month residency, catering for all diets from plant-based to gluten-free. His interpretation of New Nordic cuisine with local produce includes sprouted coconut and caviar, grilled squid with braised seaweed, and sour banana parfait.

As a master of fire cooking, Alexandre Carausu has a profession that no longer exists in France. La Calypso is a French-style asador, unique in Brittany, and Carausu grills turbot, red mullet, sardines and sea bream in the large fireplace of his traditional Breton house. Asadores are grilled meat restaurants in Spain, some very famous. Order the lobster and your wallet will feel it, but the food is really worth it.

Spaghetti with baby plum tomatoes, capers, black olives and lemon zest, ravioli with lemon, butter and herbs, potato gnocchi with Castelmagno, steak from local Fassone cattle which are as muscular as a professional boxer and produce meat with little fat but lots of flavour. In short, this little inn near Florence combines all the qualities of la bella Italia, even if purists might say the food sometimes leans towards France and Sicily. Great ingredients, fine cooking, uncomplicated food, a good wine list and friendly service. What more could you ask for?

You can see the sea from the terrace at Güeyu Mar, but if it swims and it’s edible, it’ll soon be on the grill. Oysters, angulas (baby eels), every shellfish in the book, not to mention the historic tuna with tomatoes and onions. A bastion of gastronomic pleasure with extraordinary natural produce.

A beautiful taverna on the seafront of Elia Beach near Nikiti. Good food is a family affair for female founder Giota Koufadakis and her niece Vergina. The food is Greek, of course, but with adaptations, and Giota proves that Greek cuisine is more than souvlaki and moussaka by cooking great tasting dishes with fresh produce and passion. Mpoukadoura is well known throughout the region. If only the whole country was dotted with tavernas just like Giota’s.

Karen Torosyan is a champion pie maker, bringing glory to anything and everything that can be wrapped in pastry, reinvigorating this aspect of our culinary history. Salmon coulibiac, a pork pie with foie gras, sweetbreads, a genuine Beef Wellington with foie gras and mushrooms...these are all dishes that would be in danger of disappearing in the era of global cuisine. Torosyan is a true artist, no question about it.

An object lesson in tradition. Daniel et Denise is a bouchon. And bouchons are the soul of Lyon's gastronomy. The chef is Joseph Viola, who has studied with great chefs such as Michel Guérard and Jean-Paul Lacombe (Léon de Lyon). Come for the omelette du curé with crayfish tails, the terrines en croûte, fish quenelles, pan-fried calf's liver and Bresse chicken with morels. A “rich” cuisine, as the French say: rich in taste, rich in sauces, rich in pleasure.

Chef Seong-il Kim is a wise man. It might seem effortless to produce beautiful food. It can be much more difficult to do this within the context of the traditions of a country or a particular region. At La Yeon in Seoul's famous Shilla Hotel, Seong-il Kim serves steamed cabbage with crab meat, braised abalone with barley porridge and perilla seeds, Hot Pot Royal with seasonal fish, slices of Korean beef, and vegetables in beef broth. The focus is on the quality of the principal ingredients, such as the meat. It's all about subtlety; familiarity for Koreans and new horizons for foreigners.

Owamni is the first permanent site from James Beard award winner Sean Sherman and his partner Dana Thompson. Sherman is known for his Sioux Chef educational popups and the Indigenous Food Lab, which seeks to address the health and social issues of indigenous communities by reinvigorating Native food cultures. Owamni’s location, by the Owámniyomni falls on the Upper Mississippi, is sacred to the Dakota people. Sherman uses only ancestral ingredients, which means no dairy, wheat, cane sugar, beef, pork or chicken. Instead, he serves a “decolonized” menu based on Native American cuisine’s “three sisters” - corn, beans and squash - featuring lake trout and white bean tostada, cedar-braised bison, apple and leek taco, and preserved rabbit with fermented blueberry.

T.k stands for Test Kitchen. Michael Adé Elégbède's restaurant in Ikoyi, Lagos is clandestine - almost a hidden secret. Elégbède is one of a number of young chefs who are taking the recipes and ingredients of his homeland and integrating them into today's cuisine. His shrimp with banga, a soup made from palm fruits or his Ayamase ragout with goat and rice are free interpretations but still loyal to his grandmother's cooking. Somewhere to try right away.

Kin Dee means “Eat Well” in Thai. Self-taught female chef and former model Dalad Khambu has quickly become an ambassador for Thai cuisine in Berlin, and speaks out against artificial flavourings and cheap takes on her country's food. She prepares her dishes with a Thai approach, buying her ingredients and vegetables nearby because “a papaya salad in Germany shouldn’t taste the same as a papaya salad in Thailand.” Dalad Khambu's lesson? If you treat Thai food as a great cuisine, you’ll find that it is a great cuisine. This is how it’s treated at Kin Dee.

Scottish female talent Lorna McNee, 34, is drawing old fans and curious diners to the Scottish city of Glasgow. Following 12 years at Gleneagles under the late Andrew Fairlie, and a win at the 2019 Great British Menu competition, she took her first head chef role at Glasgow’s Cail Bruich in 2020. Known for marrying exquisite presentation with robust Scottish flavours, a McNee menu might feature wild Scottish mushrooms with black garlic, brioche, and black truffle, or Orkney scallop with apple, cucumber, and kohlrabi.

In these unpredictable times, Peru’s loss has become a home run for the Philippines. Chef Kevin Uy, 27, spent time studying Peruvian cuisine in the Andes before working at the feted Central in Lima, and was due back there when the pandemic hit. He decided to bring what he’s learned from Virgilio Martínez to a Filipino audience, and at Viajé is serving popular Peruvian dishes to take away at gourmet levels: pollo a la brasa, cochinillo, chicken fat tacos, fried yuca.

La Mirande is one of the most beautiful hotels in France. While it’s always had good chefs, they’ve moved on without causing a stir. Let's hope Florent Pietravalle stays. His menu reads almost like an adventure novel: the best of the vegetable garden with Migliore oyster, XO sauce, samphire, buckwheat and flat bread, Figatellu sausage and Brousse de Rove cheese, burnt onion with sardine, caviar garum, horseradish and beef marrow. His dishes are all highly technical and carefully put together.

Robuchon Etoile female chef Mélanie Serre has revived this Parisian neighbourhood bistro. There’s veal and foie gras terrine en croûte, trotters on toast, quail stuffed with dried fruits, and saddle of venison, but also confit beef cheek in miso and goji berries in the blackcurrant coulis. The Robuchon touch makes itself known in dishes such as spider crab with Imperial of Sologne caviar, in shellfish gel. Superb wine dinners.