A Guide To The World's Best Fine Dining Restaurants

Where to Dine -  'Reviewing the Reviewers'


Selecting The Top Restaurants To Dine At Using Popular Ratings Guides

The first gastronomic guidebook was invented and written by Alexandre-(Balthazard)-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière 1758- 1837. He was a Parisian lawyer who opened the door to criticism of food and cookery with (Almanach des Gourmands) in 1803, the gastronomic treatise (Manuel des Amphitryons) in 1808, and the gourmet periodical (Journal des Gourmands et des Belles) in 1806. There was literature about food and eating before Grimod, but it was concerned only with technical aspects and recipes, while Grimod introduced the idea of food criticism.

(Source: Ory, Pascal. (n.d.). Gastronomy. Retrieved from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Balthazar_Laurent_Grimod_de_La_Reyni%C3%A8re#cite_note-ory-13

 A cornerstone of understanding top fine dining is to know who and where these restaurants are located, which usually starts with rating guides historically. Without leaving your home, you can begin and continue the journey of learning and understanding the best of the best by reading reviews, visiting the restaurants' websites, and reading restaurant rating guides. Note that the rating guides are just one-page noncritical overviews of each restaurant except for the rating they give each. Top food bloggers' reviews have a much more in-depth analysis, followed by local newspapers and magazines. Rating guides are a great place to learn restaurant sophistication levels' differences. But, like one might choose what outlets to read their news every day as most are often slanted, each guide should be reviewed and establish your filter for the pros and cons. This would include location and sophistication level. The differences between the very top Michelin 3-stars or Gault&Millau 19's as opposed to lesser restaurants is only truly and almost fully understood by a tiny minority of readers. You have to take a leap of faith that a handful of experts are telling you which restaurants are at this level unless you reach this pinnacle.  

 These guidebooks give the world very important yardsticks of comparison between countries. It might not be 100% accurate, but it is a big benefit to the connoisseur to see better the big picture of how restaurants closer to diners geographically fare against the rest of the world. This should lead to easier decisions of where to travel next by city or to a specific restaurant(s).

 The geographical focus for dining guides is limited to the United States and France, which have the most Michelin 3-star restaurants (excluding Japan). Though Michelin 3-stars and Gault&Millau 19's can be found from Asia to Austria, most readers of this book are from the United States. France is the world's most popular tourist destination, home of haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine, the most significant number of the most prolific and famous chefs, and much more. Michelin 3-stars in other countries like Scandanavia, Spain, and Japan are a recent phenomenon compared to the 50 to 200 years that France has led the way almost by itself before that. Are these other countries 'a flash in the pan' when we look back 50 years from now?