The world's Top 100 eating experiences

Compulsive and irrelevant list-making is often taken by behavioural therapists as an indicator of such personality drawbacks as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD).

Extending that model to the corporate world, there can be no doubt that the restaurant business, above all others, is in need of professional psychiatric help.

The catering industry is obsessed with list-making and categorisation, to the detriment of any sort of real self-knowledge. If it’s not getting all excited about Michelin stars, it’s sweating over the Gaullt-Millault rankings, booing the Zagat list or reeling back at the news that Harden’s rates Heston higher than Gordon for originality of tableware (even if Gordon comes off better for menu fount and flower displays).

So for me, the annual announcement of the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” (and I use quotation marks, because they simply aren’t) is real head-in-the-sand time. I just want to stay in bed till it goes away. I stopped taking part as a judge years ago, when I realised that if everybody else judging had been to as few of the restaurants on the list as I had (and most of them had been to far fewer) then the comparative element was a sham, and the findings complete bunkum.

I mean, I don’t mind if San Pellegrino wants to try to sell more mineral water. It’s a tough business to be in when the world is finally waking up to the fact that water from the tap tastes better, costs less and does far less damage to the planet. But this thoroughly self-regarding, vain little annual exercise in bogus internationalism is surely not the way.

El Bulli comes top again. It usually does. Fine, it’s a perfectly OK restaurant. Heston, who sometimes wins, comes second, which is not bad for a restaurant that has been closed for most of the run-up to the list because it poisoned 40-odd customers, and two-times-winner the French Laundry drops seven places to No 11 — which is still a good showing given the yawn-inducingly dreary 20-course meal I had there last October. I swear, I had better meals in two other restaurants on the same “street” in Yountville, California.

St John climbs up to No 14, in keeping with the Michelin star it won last year, but it was at its revolutionary best ten years ago, and these accolades have rather the whiff of belated lifetime achievement awards, like Paul Newman’s Oscar for The Color of Money.

There’s a top three slot for Noma, in Copenhagen, which is fascinating news if you’re planning a trip to Denmark, but I don’t think I have ever met somebody who was. And for the first time I see there is no place at all for Gordon Ramsay, so it’s just as well that — as has been widely reported in the past week — he has diversified into ready meals.

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Drinks

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies