Barcelona’s Disfrutar tops 2024 World’s 50 Best Restaurants; 2 in Hong Kong fast risers

Hong Kong Cantonese restaurants earn Highest Climber and Highest New Entry awards, three Spanish restaurants in World’s 50 Best top five

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The team from Disfrutar in Barcelona, named No 1 on the 2024 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in a ceremony at Las Vegas’ Encore Theatre. Photo: World’s 50 Best Restaurants

Published: 5:59pm, 6 Jun 2024Updated: 6:37pm, 6 Jun 2024

Barcelona-based modernist hotspot Disfrutar has been crowned World’s Best Restaurant at an awards ceremony held in Las Vegas, in the United States.

The 2nd and 4th places on the list also went to Spanish restaurants: live-fire grill specialist Asador Etxebarri, headed by self-taught chef Victor Arguizoniz, and avant-garde Madrid-based DiverXO, by punk-style chef David Munoz, respectively.

Two Hong Kong restaurants experienced a stratospheric rise and took home individual awards.

Paris-based Table by Bruno Verjus, another self-taught chef, moved up to third spot after entering the list for the first time in 2023 in 10th place. Maido in Peru, headed by Mitsuharu “Micha” Tsumura, who also won the Chef’s Choice Award, rounded out the top five.

Disfrutar’s Oriol Castro (left), Eduard Xatruch (centre) and Matei Casanas. Photo: Disfrutar

Disfrutar is headed by chefs Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch, and Mateu Casañas, who met in the kitchen of el Bulli, the boundary-breaking Spanish restaurant that dominated the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Good morning on the other side of the world in Spain,” said an emotional Castro from the stage at the June 5 ceremony at the Encore Theatre, before continuing in Spanish to say that the Disfrutar team, which had become like family, had for years poured their hearts into making the restaurant what it is today.