全球50最佳餐厅的七个谬误 Seven Things Wrong With the 50Best

稍早我在opinionatedaboutdining看到这篇由AlanGardner所发表的文章，内容对于六月一号才公布的全球前50最佳餐厅名单发表他的看法...



稍早我在opinionated about dining看到这篇由Alan Gardner所发表的文章，内容对于六月一号才公布的全球前50最佳餐厅名单发表他的看法。

是的，排名以及奖项可以鼓励人们上馆子消费，这份名单也改变了许多餐厅的命运。Gardner本身也吃遍了全球前一百家中的59家，而我自己个人大约是20几家。他同时也举出这份名单的七个主要的问题：

1. 这份排名来自全球972名评审，每个人仅有七张票。每位评审的票数不足，无法实际反应排名。
2. 选择偏见：每一个区域的35名投票者這中的34名投票者由区域的主席选择，这并非一个透明的流程，主席可能选择与自己看法类似的投票者。
3. 世界各地的用餐体验原本就不同。
4. 错误的假设，必须是居住该地的人才了解该区域餐厅。
5. 由于依照区域来投票本地（区域）的投票者比需投本地（区域）餐厅，即便他认为其他区域的餐厅更好。
6. 前几名不断的重复，我们可以合理的假设并不是投票者都去过前三名，但是大多数人有机会便会倾向去尝试前三名的餐厅。一年内有机会拜访完前五十吗这的确是个问题。
7. 缺乏统一的判断标准 - 在世界不同地区的美食记者对用餐体验有不同的标准。

“他们要求以自己的区域内表决的方式似乎有些奇怪。他们的研究方法使“跨越”区域的比较非常困难，但排名的前提却是世界性的。纽约食客如何认为在日本用餐的状况，反之亦然“。~ World’s greatest statistical expert, Nate Silver of 538.com

长期以来我使用Best50来宣传我的餐饮活动或是美食之旅，无论是对于宣传及销售的确有画龙点睛的效果。而名次可以改变一家餐厅以及厨师的命运，如何能够完善投票系统是Best50目前遇到最大的挑战。最后以有阿根廷厨神之称的Francis Mallmann 2013请辞Best50评审的一封信的内容作为总结。

希望在这排名的影响力日益壮大的状况下，改善投票机制的运作，就像是电影蜘蛛侠里所说的：能力越大，责任就越大。最初设计排名的团队可能没有想过影响力会如此大的一天。





Buenos Aires august 29 2013

To:San Pellegrino Awards/Restaurant magazine, London

From:Francis Mallmann

Thanks so much for choosing me as one of your voting members but
I have decided not to vote any more in your awards. I have been feeling this way the last two years, and now I can’t do it anymore.

You, see I have been cooking now for 40years. As you know,cooking is a romance with produce, space, service, timing and silence. This runs counter to the sentiments I observe in so many of my colleagues who are so concerned with the awards that they spend the year lobbying the electorate, jetting to conferences, and, in my view, wasting precious time, and walking away from the true values of what restaurants are.

Awards created a ficticious, hyper competitive ambiance for our cooking culture.Innovation seems to be the prime value.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it has moved us away from valuing craft in pursuit or so-called art. Young chefs attempt to cross bridges, long before they should just for the sake of being, new, different and famous.

Artisan intellectual thought, and eating good food & wine has more to do with the senses and with sharing. Wine & food makes us more acute, witty,trenchant. Only then can it stimulate our thoughts and improves our communion with our peers, friends, lovers. Certainly food can be intelectual, but in amore silent, dare I say humble, way.

To be sure, I have been greatly honoured tobe number 7 on your list the first year.

It’s just that my cooking life has no links with these awards any more.

So I wish you all best and thanks again for allowing me to serve these past years in your board.

Let us break bread together,

Francis Mallmann.

以下为原文

Seven Things Wrong With the 50Best

Posted by Alan Gardner on 06/05/2015

The release of the annual results of the 50Best List always causes a considerable amount of commotion in the restaurant world. For the record, even though the list has some obvious warts, I happen tolike it and I find it useful. Face it, any publication that encourages peopleto dine out at the top restaurants in the world is good for anyone who fancies themselves as a dining aficionado. This is true even for myself as I have onlybeen to 59 out of their Top 100, which gives me incentive to visit the restaurantsI haven’t been to. More importantly, the list encourages people to look at dining out from a global perspective. Something that we need more of. Of course none of that precludes me from offering a critique of the list, and from what I understand, the methodology they use to compile the results.

Since the list was published, there havebeen a number of articles that attempt to explain how the results are derived.Steve Dolinsky’s article on the topic is best one I have come across: 50Best Restaurants List Announced and Explained . And since Dolinsky’sarticle offers details about the methodology that is used (972 voters splitinto 27 different panels around the world each cast 7 votes, 4 for restaurantsin their own region and 3 outside their region), it makes for a good starting point for a discussion. As such, may I point out the following which I have listed by bullet points. Hopefully, this will help you understand the list better, and offer some explanation as to why you might agree/disagree with their results.

1. An insufficient number of votes are cast - The list’s organizers collect 6804 votes each year (972 x 7 votes) which is an insufficient number of votes to create a worldwide ranking system that makes any real sense. And when you factor in various restrictions they place on how people can cast their vote(which I will get into in further detail below), things get much worse.

2. Selection bias – Rather than the voters being randomly selected which is the underpinning of any good survey, 34 of the 35 voters in each regional panel areselected by that region’s chair. While there is no way of knowing how this selection bias plays itself out (the 50Best lacks transparency), it is reasonable to assume that the chairs choose people that they believe are qualified to participate. So it is likely to assume that region’s chairs select people that are most like them when choosing the rest of the panel.

3. Dining experience differs across different regions of the world – If you can find me 35 voters who are based in Thailand who have eaten at a large percentageof the restaurants in the Top 100, I will happy to buy you a Pad Thai at the Thai restaurant of your choice. As I said above, I am one of the most experienced diners you will ever meet and I have only been to 59 out of their Top 100.

4. The wrong headed assumption that the people with the most dining experience for a specific region, happen to live in that region – I have three friends who are expert on the restaurants of Japan. They respectively live in Hong Kong,Bangkok and Atlanta, Georgia. Yet the 50Best rules would prevent them from being on the Japanese voting panel.

5. Forced distribution of votes by region – Let’s assume my friend in Atlantais on the voting panel for his region and he is forced to vote for 4restaurants in his home region. But what if he feels that the top 4 restaurantsin his home region do not deserve to be in the Top 100, let alone in his top 7?This is the reason that restaurants like Dinner by Heston or Test Kitchen in Capetown, South Africa over-perform. In regions that are not overflowing with great restaurants, the handful of good restaurants (or well-known ones) arenamed on every ballot. Meanwhile, because there are so many great restaurantsin countries like France and Japan, the votes are split across so many restaurants that results for many great restaurants are diluted.

6. Constipation at the top of the list – It is reasonable to assume that not everyone who votes has visited the top three restaurants. And it is alsoreasonable to assume that that those are the restaurants that people are most likely to visit over the following year after the list is announced. Given this limitation, it will take the 972 voters a very long period of time to cycle through those three restaurants. This is why Cellar Can Roca, Noma and OsteriaFrancescana have been playing hopscotch at the top of the list for the past few years.

7. A lack of a unifying judging standard – Food journalists in different partsof the world see the dining experience differently. European food journalists(excluding the UK) are prone to seeing fine dining as an art form. Certain French journalists see dining as a matter of class and luxury. And many journalists in the US and UK write about dining from the perspective of consumerism and consumption. This is why the restaurants on the list from Spain veer towards the cutting edge, and why the U.S. restaurants are pretty much the same French restaurants that have been in business for 20 years. If you were tounpeel the onion as to why that is the case you will find that in general, the Spanish food media appreciates innovation in cuisine but the U.S. food media does not. Hence the lack of any cutting edge US restaurants on the list aside from Alinea.

Since my main complaint is with the list’s methodology and how it is organized,and since I am not a statistician, I turned to the world’s greatest statistical expert, Nate Silver of 538.com for histhoughts on the list and here is what he told me:

“The way they are asking people to vote within their regions seems strange.Their methodology is making it incredibly hard to compare restaurants“across" regions, which would seem to be the whole point of a world’s bestlist. How do New York diners feel about the food scene in Japan, and viceversa."

I guess that is a more succinct way of addressing a number of the issues I have mentioned above. I mean who here believes that the 35 people who make up thevoting panel for the Eastern portion of the U.S. have a sufficient amount of experience dining in Japan? Most of the experienced diners I know would vote for places likeSushi Saito or Matsukawa as being the best restaurants in Japan. Furthermore, I am certain that they would find the idea that Ryguin and Narisawa are the best restaurants in the country rather amusing.

Which brings me to the word “best." While I understand that to many peoplethe word best might mean the most artistic cuisine, and to another person it might mean the most profitable restaurant which also serves food above acertain standard, the idea that the world’s best restaurant can be devoid ofany new artistry does not sit well with me. And to me, restaurants like Daniel,Le Bernardin, & the French Laundry haven’t created anything new in quite along time. And I think anyone would be hard pressed to find an award ceremonywhere there is not a strong correlation between advancing the art or businessof the subject in question, and who ends up on the list and where.

The reality is that the 50Best is really made up of two components. The firstpart is creating a list of the top 2-3 restaurant in each of their votingregions based on 4,050 votes which end up being cast for restaurants in the voter’s home region. Once that aspect of their list is complete, they then look at the 2754 votes that are cast for restaurants located outside of the voter’shome region in order to determine the order of the list. But as Nate Silver accurately points out, the second part of the exercise cannot fix the problems caused by the methodology they use in the first part which is using regional voting panels whose hands are tied in terms of who they can vote for by therules.Of course, for marketing purposes it’s a great system as San Pellegrino can sell more water in South Africa and Moscow. Places where destination diners are not really traveling to eat despite the fact that they are appearing on the list. And thereby lies the rub.

Of course, this is how the media wants things to be when it comes to food.Their real interest is in attracting clicks and selling advertising, not reporting on what the best restaurants in the world might be. A case in point about this disease that they are afflicted with is Ryan Sutton’s analysis of the list in Eater titled: Five Charts That Demystify the 50Best which among other things, complains that places like India and China are “under-represented." As if it is automatic to assume that those countries actually have restaurants that deserve to be on the list. I don’t think I have seen a more blatant example of the inherent conflict between the food press and the hobby of eating out.

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