The king is dead; long live the king. Just when it seem that the food world had moved definitively beyond the high-wire pyrotechnics of modern Spanish cooking to embrace the less adorned lichen and sea buckthorn of new Nordic cuisine, along came the 2013 list of the San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants to say: not so fast. At its annual awards ceremony, held April 29 in London's Guild Hall, the top honor went to El Celler de Can Roca, located in the northeastern Spanish city of Girona. There, avant-garde executive chef Joan Roca invents daring new dishes from things like distilled soil; one of his younger brothers, sommelier Josep, keeps a cellar where music and video images are matched to the flavors of his favorite wines; and the other, pastry chef Jordi, creates desserts that taste like the fragrance of well-known perfumes. Copenhagen's Noma, which had held the top spot for the past three years, fell to second place. Among Spaniards, Can Roca's victory came as welcome reassurance that the country's moment in the culinary sun was not over. Although Spanish restaurants have performed strongly for several years — two others, Mugaritz and Arzak, retained their positions in the top 10 of 2013's list — it hasn't taken first place since Copenhagen's Noma displaced Ferran Adrià's revolutionary elBulli in 2010. "It shows a consolidation of our position," says Rafael Ansón, president of the Royal Spanish Academy of Gastronomy. "It's the strongest confirmation that in the world of chef-artists, we are the best." (MORE: Nomanomics: How One Restaurant Is Changing Denmark's Economy) But the results came as a surprise to some. Says Joanna Savill, director of the festival Crave Sydney: "You have to admire Can Roca, because what they do is so beautiful, so poetic, so evocative. But that's not the global story at the moment. The global story, the new story, is about chefs reflecting who and where they are." That the restaurant industry now craves novelty almost as much as Hollywood does can be attributed in part to the(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=84368&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin