Opinion – Gero: The 50 Best List is the most pathetic because it wants something impossible

At this time of the year, the countless lists with the best restaurants start to publish their results, each one based on a criterion and most of them unknown.

At this same time some newspaper editors, perhaps as confused as I am, kindly ask me to write an article in an attempt to explain something.

It turns out that it is impossible, as I have said in the past. The criteria are either personal, or they are online polls, where several restaurants run campaigns with the intention of having a better result. Campaigns like: “Don’t forget to vote for us. It’s very important for us”.

Let’s start with the most important, but the most ridiculous, the most pathetic, which is the one that intends to elect the best restaurant in the world, the 50 Best, as if that were possible.

It seems that today it is even a little more serious than it was in the past, when press offices sent work proposals in the sense of “help” to get on the list. They included, in addition to the price, air tickets for journalists, accommodation, dinners, etc.

I even received free English journalists who were important in the poll at my hotel, all at the request of a chef friend in Brazil, who would later take them to the Amazon. On their return, they slept one more night at Fasano. When they had an ossobuco dinner here, one of them, with the best English humor, said: “Thank God, real food again!”.

This list is made up of chefs who mostly know each other, visit each other, talk to each other. One votes for the other, and everyone has to have a certain philosophy in common.

Classic cuisine doesn’t interest them, it has to be invention. Even if it freaks out.

And, normally, you have to have in your body important, philosophical sayings: “Cooking is art and art is culture”. However, they forgot that cooking has always been culture, long before it was considered art.

Tell me how you can compare a restaurant that cooks with liquid nitrogen with a classic kitchen. Both can even be very good — although I am somewhat suspicious of the use of liquid nitrogen, which is so fashionable, since, in my childhood, it was used to remove warts. Will it be good for your stomach?

Geniuses like Ferran Adrià are very few, most are vulgar copycats. No one like him invented a spoon full of holes to eat corn flakes. One home goal in life is enough to be part of history.

I still find it very strange that very few of these restaurants today come from Italy or France, and, yes, from Peru, Colombia, Korea…

There’s only one thing more pathetic than the “list” —even if Fasano made it to one of them this year— and that is the critics who refer to it as the Oscar of Gastronomy. But how so? Several years and the same movie? Coppola, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, De Niro would be winning since 1971 with the first of the most spectacular trilogy of cinema to date, “The Godfather”.

Recently, the great French magazine Bon Appétit did an article whose title was: “We Need to Stop Taking This List Seriously”.

Several other guides followed the same path and make an election regionally, the best in São Paulo, the best in Rio, etc. There are so many awards that almost all establishments in São Paulo put “The Best of São Paulo” on their facades. There, cite in small letters the source.

The other day, cycling through São Paulo, I passed in front of several of the best pastries, best coxinhas, best pizza, best kibbeh, best esfiha, best cheese bread.

Almost like advertising, with its countless awards, lions of gold, silver, copper, platinum, iron, for almost all participants. Nobody goes to Cannes and comes back empty-handed.

It’s true, some don’t even go. But what bothers me the most is the concept of “the best of”. They are places so different from each other that the only way to judge them is to put punctuation, forks, stars and, above all, the publication has to be sovereign.

You can’t do that award ceremony that creates anticipation, just like a reality show where the winner is announced at the time, among three finalists, who are looking at each other with hatred during “the party”, and that leave many more people frustrated than happy.

I can say this with peace of mind and sincerity, as I have already won several of these awards, countless ones, and it has always been embarrassing for me to look back at the others. We are not Formula 1 racers, we are all colleagues in such an arduous and difficult profession.

We opened the restaurant in New York almost a year ago, where I have never seen this happen. Just as they don’t give a damn to The Restaurant’s English list. Nobody cares!

The great joy of being in New York is knowing that your restaurant can be frequented by almost everyone. The doorman of the building. An Italian where I rent an apartment, and who was there with his wife the other day, filled me with joy.

As you may know, I am a restaurateur and not a chef, a dying profession. Only chef restaurants will survive in the future, and specialized criticism has not helped at all — on the contrary, it does not value anyone who thinks about the restaurant as a whole.

They try to put an end to it by not explaining, for example, as I read the other day, that rice with banana, steak, fried egg and farofa is not risotto. This is a disservice. Just like nobody explains that anything with oil al tartufo is fake, chemical and has nothing to do with the real fresh truffle. I doubt it’s good for your health, but they proliferate like plagues even among the Japanese in São Paulo. Horrible! Just like lately we see risottos that are finished with cream. Poor my nonna!

In my opinion, this should be one of the functions of criticism. This is perhaps why they are losing so much ground to social media. Not everything is as good as they say and, time after time, the best of the year doesn’t even make it to the end of next year.

I’ve been hitting on this topic for several years, but I must say that the way I try to collaborate is with my role as a restaurateur, whose great pleasure is to please others with a great evening or a pleasant lunch. I don’t want applause, I’m not a genius at practically anything, I may have some talent but, for sure, the biggest one is overwork.

Also stop taking seriously who is the “best of”. Scoring is the only way, and even better, as did Zagats, the greatest guide there ever was, scoring not just the cuisine but the service, the atmosphere and, of course, the price. These are the items that really make a restaurant good, and this is, in my opinion, what a guide should do when trying to explain a city. One can always disagree with him or not.

I, for one, would like to be judged only by Italian critics, but I know this is impossible. Just as I also find it impossible for a single critic to speak about French, Italian, Japanese, Peruvian, Brazilian cuisines, etc. Do as in Zagats, point to the kitchen, the service, the architecture (the environment) and, obviously, how much it costs.

Don’t make me a dinosaur. I don’t want to be extinct. By now, only the chefs’ restaurants will remain and, perhaps, worse food will be eaten, but the critics seem to be more interested in creating “novelties”, even if they last for a short time. Getting old is easy and we all will be, but becoming a classic, like us, is very difficult. Believe me!

In metropolises full of natives, the cuisine of its origin has to have the same importance as Brazilian cuisine in Brazil, ceviche in Peru. Or, do a fusion cuisine that will confuse everyone by putting soy sauce on spaghetti.