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Preview data: all rankings, scores, votes, refresh labels, methodology, testing and editorial-process statements in Top 49 are illustrative demo content, not live measurements or documented reviews.
Rank 122Up 2
#12 in World’s Best Restaurants
of 20 ranked entries
Eleven Madison Park
New York City, USA · Daniel Humm
Went fully plant-based in 2021, a genuinely risky move for a restaurant holding three Michelin stars, and has largely made the case that fine dining does not require meat to justify its prices. Not every diner has been convinced, and the restaurant knows it. Recorded specifics: cuisine Plant-Based Fine Dining, city New York, opened 1998. Panel highlighted one of the few three-star restaurants to bet its entire identity on a genuine conviction, vegetable technique pushed further than almost any peer kitchen and dining room and service retained the polish from its pre-2021 era. The reservation on record is the plant-based pivot has cost it some of its pre-2021 devoted following.
Vegetarian-friendlyTasting menu
Score breakdown
How Eleven Madison Park earned 82.7
Each criterion is scored independently, then combined using the weights published on World’s Best Restaurants.
- Cooking technique & consistencyweight 35%
- 84.9
- Service & roomweight 20%
- 79.9
- Ingredient sourcingweight 20%
- 81.4
- Reputation among peers & criticsweight 25%
- 82.8
“Retained all three Michelin stars after the menu change, making it the first fully plant-based restaurant to hold three stars anywhere.”
— Top 49, on World’s Best Restaurants
On the record
Recorded detail
| Cuisine | Plant-Based Fine Dining |
|---|---|
| City | New York |
| Opened | 1998 |
| Tasting menu | $365 |
| Rating | 8.5 |
Panel verdict
Strengths and reservations
What it gets right
- One of the few three-star restaurants to bet its entire identity on a genuine conviction
- Vegetable technique pushed further than almost any peer kitchen
- Dining room and service retained the polish from its pre-2021 era
Where it gives ground
- The plant-based pivot has cost it some of its pre-2021 devoted following
1 appearance
Where this entry ranks
From the same list
Ranked alongside it
Rank 01Editor’s pickCentral
Lima, Peru · Virgilio Martínez
The menu is organised by Peruvian altitude rather than by course — dishes climb from ocean floor to the Andean highlands over sixteen stages, each built around ingredients from that specific elevation. No other tasting menu treats geography as its actual structure.
95.9/100 Top 49 score1Up 1
Rank 02Editor’s pickNoma
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The restaurant that made foraging and fermentation the default language of high-end cooking for a generation of chefs who trained there and then went home to open their own places. Three distinct seasonal menus a year — seafood, vegetable, game — rather than one fixed identity.
95.0/100 Top 49 score1Up 1
Rank 03Editor’s pickOsteria Francescana
Modena, Italy · Massimo Bottura
Bottura treats Italian culinary tradition as material to deconstruct and rebuild rather than preserve untouched, which was genuinely controversial in a country protective of its regional cooking. "Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart" is a real dish, and its backstory is exactly what it sounds like.
94.9/100 Top 49 score2Down 2
Rank 04El Celler de Can Roca
Girona, Spain · Roca brothers
Run by three brothers who split the kitchen, dining room and wine cellar between them — a structural decision that keeps the restaurant from ever feeling like one ego’s vision. The wine list runs past 60,000 bottles, curated with the same obsessiveness as the food.
91.9/100 Top 49 score3Up 3
Rank 05Disfrutar
Barcelona, Spain
Founded by three former elBulli chefs who took Ferran Adrià’s technical playfulness and gave it a lighter, more Mediterranean register. The name means "enjoy," and the kitchen treats that as an instruction rather than a suggestion.
90.8/100 Top 49 score2Down 2
Rank 06Le Bernardin
New York City, USA · Eric Ripert
A seafood restaurant with almost no interest in doing anything unexpected to the fish — technique is applied to preserve and elevate what is already there, not to disguise it. Four decades in and the kitchen has never chased a trend it didn’t need.
89.4/100 Top 49 score2Up 2
Rank 07The French Laundry
Yountville, California, USA · Thomas Keller
Keller built American fine dining’s reference point for discipline inside a converted stone laundry building in wine country, and the restaurant still runs on the same exacting standards three decades later. "Oysters and Pearls" has been on the menu since the beginning for a reason.
88.0/100 Top 49 score—No change
Rank 08Alinea
Chicago, Illinois, USA · Grant Achatz
A tasting menu built as theatre as much as technique — a dessert course painted directly onto the table, a helium-filled edible balloon that changes the diner’s voice before they eat it. Achatz rebuilt his own sense of taste after cancer treatment and the menu still carries that history.
87.1/100 Top 49 score—No change
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Top 49 rankings are editorial. Scores are produced from the published criteria on each list and are refreshed on the cadence stated there. Figures shown across this section are curated demonstration data.