By Clinton Palanca
The winners of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants has been introduced, the list launched.
There will be the traditional accusations that the record is biased, commercialised, a big publicity stunt and, most essential, that it is of very little worth to the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants.
Food tourism has become an enormous deal. Ridiculous bear in mind when I began writing about journey, back in the days I was traveling most of the time, and writing that this mad-rush visit to the cathedrals, temples or ruins, was overrated, and that one may be taught rather more about a metropolis by sitting down in a restaurant, eating the local delicacies and watching the locals go about their enterprise.
These days I find myself within the awkward place of having to reverse my stance and insist that individuals make an effort to go to museums, the Colosseum, the palace—even if doing so means you’ll miss the lunch reserving in the two-Michelin-star restaurant you made 4 months prematurely.
Culinary vacationers who fly in and go from one celebrity restaurant to the opposite make me nervous. They insist that the delicacies should be native, the ingredient regionally sourced, the menu reflective of the culture of the nation or metropolis.
It sounds, actually, as if they’re on the lookout for the information of a civilisation or of a individuals to be served as a lot as them on a plate – or perhaps 10 plates, as part of a degustation menu. This just isn’t the role food should play, this isn’t a burden that eating places should assume.
Restaurants are nice bastions of civilisation, but they need to not take the place of the civilization itself.
The listing, while controversial, ephemeral or flawed like all human endeavour, is a continuing statement that food matters, that it’s one thing more than what we eat to feed ourselves.
Well-heeled “completists” will manage about half of the list. Most of us can be fortunate to get to go to more than a handful of the eating places on the Asia’s Top 50 list, extra so the World’s 50 Best list.
For each naysayer who says that each one this hype is out of proportion and it’s solely meals, it isn’t. Because it’s about individuals. It’s concerning the farmer who grows specialty mushrooms, about people like myself who sit by a keyboard and sort out opinions about what we just ate.
Here’s the full list HERE.
But most of all, it’s concerning the cooks who peel, scrape, boil and cut back, broil, bake and torch and ferment and plate and serve and clear, and who think, evening after night time, tips on how to make people eat higher.
All of us, including the much-feared judges of the listing, are there to have fun the act of creation that they and so many others do—often to so little reward..