Reaction to the publication of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2010 List has, in the main, been pretty much what you'd expect. First off, thousands of restaurant collectors and foodie tourists stormed the online booking system at winner Noma – 100,000 of them to be exact – only to find that the last time there was a free table was on the night just after the award was announced.
It all must have come as a bit of shock to Noma’s chef Rene Redzepi who told The Telegraph’s Xanthe Clay the day after the awards that he couldn’t imagine getting a table would be too hard; ‘We're talking about Copenhagen. We have two free tables tonight.’
Here in London, cunning restaurant-lovers had managed to find another way to sample Noma's wares by nabbing a seat at The Loft Project. On Friday, the guest chef was none other than Noma’s former sous chef, Samuel Miller.
Across the Channel, the French were seething about their poor showing in the list (not one spot in the Top 10). As the Guardian reported, food critic Francois Simon considered it the height of foolishness to try and come up with a World’s Best Resturant. ‘How silly to try to carve that in stone... And yet our friends (we’re pretty sure he’s referring to the Brits here), who rarely cross their own borders, have just published this idiotic classification.’ Hot Dinners won't be saying a thing about pots and kettles at this. Oh no.
Meanwhile, here in Blighty and over at the Express, William Sitwell, editor of the newly-titled Waitrose Kitchen couldn’t understand ‘who on earth the people are who pay £150 a head to eat at some of these restaurants where a degree in science seems to be more valuable than having read Elizabeth David’ and said he’d been told that the list ‘has no relevance to anyone apart from those who might feature on the list and a handful of obsessive food writers and bloggers.’
Well that’s as maybe, but as Noma watches its switchboard melting and the Danish tourist board tries to work out how to accommodate the hordes of ravening gastro-tourists coming its way, the people of Copenhagen must be pretty pleased about the whole thing.
In conclusion, if this whole list thing’s whet your appetite, you happen to have some money in your pocket and are a sucker for a good cause, head for the Action against Hunger charity auction on Ebay where dinner for two at Noma was £363, the last time we looked.
