No more Noma top spot as Catalonia reclaims best restaurant title

The staff at El Celler de Can Roca have created the world's finest dining experience

Copenhagen’s acclaimed Noma has been ousted from its position as the world’s best restaurant by Catalonia’s El Celler de Can Roca, which is located a mere 50km from El Bulli.

Ferran Adrià’s famous Catalan restaurant was rated as Restaurant magazine’s best restaurant four years running between 2006-2009, after which point the accolade headed north to Denmark’s Noma, where it has remained ever since…

However, this year sees the title snapped up by El Bulli’s fresh-faced neighbour, El Celler de Can Roca. Having started life as a small family-run business in a Catalan working class district, the restaurant has slowly garnered worldwide acclaim for its commitment to ‘freestyle, avant garde cuisine’.

El Celler de Can Roca is run by its two founding brothers and a third brother who joined in 1997 – just after the establishment claimed its first Michelin star. Today, with three Michelin stars under its belt, the restaurant has taken its ‘generously, simply and honestly prepared food’ ethos to another level, and has left its fans hungry for more (although not literally, of course).

Restaurant magazine’s annual poll is the bellwether by which all of the world’s top restaurants jostle for position. This year, Spain can boast five restaurants in the top 50 – an achievement bettered only by France and the USA (although the highest-ranked French restaurant – Paris’ L’Arpège – limps in at a lowly 16th place). The UK has three restaurants in the top 50.

Editor of Restaurant magazine, William Drew, reiterated his intention that the list be used as a trigger for the world’s diners to broaden their culinary horizons. “The top 50 restaurants are all very diverse, very different styles of cooking, atmosphere, service, style – and price,” he said at the awards ceremony.

Spanish cuisine has enjoyed something of an extended purple patch over the last decade. While the world and his wife knows all about paella, tapas and sangria, the experimental haute cuisine pioneered by Ferran Adrià helped place Spain – and the Catalan region in particular – at the epicentre of the culinary map.

And the message is spreading. The UK has experienced something of a tapas boom in recent years, with most major cities more than tripling their number of Spanish-influenced restaurants, while recent surveys into healthy living have placed Spain’s Mediterranean diet at the very top of the tree for longevity and happiness.

So if you want exceptional cuisine, brilliant choice, unbeatable value and a diet that is universally recognised as the world’s healthiest, you can’t get any better than Spain.