“Oh no you didn’t,” was my first thought as I searched for Bangkok restaurants in La Liste, a ranking of the world’s best restaurants which came out Dec 17. La Liste is 1,000 venues strong, which should allow for more diversity than World’s 50 Best Restaurants. And yet, not a single Thai restaurant is to be found on La Liste’s first page, which includes restaurants ranked 1-250. I tried page 2, restaurants ranked 251-500, still nothing. Page 3, nothing. Finally, on the last page, I found this:
#988. Le Normandie.
At that point, I laughed.
La Liste is a direct response to World’s 50 Best Restaurants, a ranking in which Bangkok had two restaurants in 2015: Gaggan (10th) and Nahm (22nd). Launched in 2002, World’s 50 Best is now as popular as it is controversial. Initially praised for celebrating culinary destinations where Michelin had never set foot, such as Bangkok, it has come under scrutiny for a voting system its critics say is opaque and nepotistic: panelists might be close friends of restaurateurs and there is no way to ensure they’ve eaten at a sufficient number of venues to have informed opinions.
Some of 50 Best’s fiercest critics are French, Joel Robuchon among them. He described 50 Best as “flip-a-coin voting.” In the 2015 edition of World’s 50 Best, there were no French restaurants in the Top 10 and only four in the entire list. Food is big business in France. Local designations of origin, like Champagne, are fiercely guarded. Chefs like Robuchon and Alain Ducasse are global brands. And the French government was not going to watch 50 Best undermine the country’s culinary reputation without a fight.
Enter La Liste. Backed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs no less, La Liste is meant to be just the opposite of 50 Best. It draws from a variety of sources, not just from an incestuous and nepotistic panel. And it is compiled by a computer, not by erratic human beings. The New York Times wrote:
“La Liste is based on an algorithm named Ciacco … invented by Antoine Ribaut, a French-American computer systems architect. He drew on data from sources that included 200 food guides in 92 countries, such as Michelin, Gault & Millau and Zagat, and crowd-sourced sites like TripAdvisor and OpenTable.”
As a result, La Liste’s tagline is “Objectively Delicious, Deliciously Objective.” Really? Along with Le Normandie at 988, Ten-sui managed to make the cut at 991. Is Bangkok objectively that much worse than 50 Best seems to think, with a mere two entries out of 1,000 versus two out of 50? (Thailand's third entrant, Samui's Ocean Eleven, sneaks in at 999.)
The answer probably lies in how France sees the global fine dining scene. La Liste is very much in line with the venerable Guide Michelin. Since 2011, Michelin has crowned some 26 restaurants with three stars in both France and Japan, making the two countries culinary equals at the top of the food chain. Similarly, La Liste has 126 restaurants in Japan, 118 in France, 101 in the United States, 69 in China, and over 50 for Spain, Germany and Italy each. Both rankings fit a worldview where France remains number one in the Western hemisphere. In fact, there is enough French fine dining in Japan that you could argue many of Paris’s hat tips to Tokyo are really a celebration of French cuisine gone global. It’s also a vision of cuisine where lines were drawn decades ago, before El Bulli’s molecular tricks or the global rise of Thai, Mexican and Pacific Rim cuisine.
La Liste’s Bangkok restaurants are in line with this antiquated vision. Le Normandie is arguably the city’s most traditional French restaurant, Ten-sui its most traditional Japanese one. Farewell, Nahm and your sloppy bowls of curry. So long, Gaggan and your molecular takes on Indian comfort food. You made it into 50 Best, but you’re not wanted in La Liste, where kaiseki and souffle reign supreme.
In Thailand, too, we’ve had our fair share of misguided protectionism. Let’s not forget David Thompson was not given a hero’s welcome when he first relocated from London to here. And since we’re on the topic of ridiculous uses of technology to objectively assess food, Thailand has a foodie robot of it’s own, the e-delicious machine, financed by the government’s Thai Delicious Committee to verify the authenticity of Thai food served at restaurants. Food protectionism makes idiots of us all.
The French foreign ministry’s Philippe Faure said, “In a short time, La Liste will become the global reference.” We’re betting it will be ignored. Thailand seems to be moving in the right direction, though. Not only is the Thai capital hosting Asia's 50 Best Restaurants this February, showing it is eager to engage with the world, but the Thailand Tourism Authority, who are sponsoring the event, held the press conference at Paste, a Thai restaurant run by an Australian-Thai couple. While it would appear Thailand is making progress in embracing the diversity of its chefs, La Liste is a worrying indication that France plans to continue to ignore the new world order.
