The collective Occupy 50 Best has launched a campaign challenging the methods and transparency of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list
Zoe Reyners is, appropriately, in a taxi on her way to lunch when we talk. Reyners and her two colleagues in Paris-based “collective” Occupy 50 Best have put le chat among the grilled pigeons with an attack on this week’s annual list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The collective’s website, launched less than a month ago, has already attracted 403 signatories, including many leading chefs, to an online petition calling on the food industry to “stop financing and supporting 50 Best if it doesn’t change its methods”.
The name “Occupy 50 Best” would suggest the collective’s driving force is economic, but their real concern is transparency. “This is a ranking based on nothing,” says Reyners, who works in PR but emphasises she has no food clients. “We want proper methods of selection.” The 50 best restaurants are chosen by a panel of 1,000 chefs, food writers and gastronomes, but Reyners says the voting process is riven with “conflicts of interest” and “cronyism” – “fishy” is the word she inevitably uses to sum it up.
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