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Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo took the No. 1 spot at The 50 Best Restaurants 2026 in Lima, ahead of Gaggan in Bangkok and Alchemist in Copenhagen.
The 50 Best Restaurants 2026 was announced on November 4 at the Teatro Municipal de Lima, and the top of the list belongs to fire. Asador Etxebarri, the grill restaurant in the village of Axpe in Atxondo, in Spain's Basque Country, was named The World's Best Restaurant 2026, sponsored by S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. It succeeds Maido of Lima, the 2025 winner, which now joins the organisation's Best of the Best hall of fame and is no longer eligible for the ranking.
The climb was short and long at once. Etxebarri was ranked No. 2 in 2025, so the final step was a single place. But the restaurant, run by chef-owner Victor Arguinzoniz, first entered the ranking in 2008 and has sat inside the top 10 every year since 2016. Few rooms on the list have been this good for this long, and the award also makes Etxebarri The Best Restaurant in Europe for 2026.
Etxebarri sits between Bilbao and San Sebastian, in a converted farmhouse with a dining room of eight tables. Arguinzoniz opened the restaurant in 1990. He is a self-taught cook, and the kitchen works around grills he designed himself, sized for a team of only a handful of chefs. Across a 14-course tasting menu, everything passes over wood fire, including the desserts.
The signatures are plain on paper and exacting in practice: Palamos prawns, flash-cooked over oak-wood coals and served on their own, and a charred beef chop that has become the restaurant's emblem.
Cooking over flames is an ancestral technique but even today, it's so important. It allows you to showcase the quality of the produce.Victor Arguinzoniz
The wine side carries its own honour: the restaurant's sommelier and manager, Mohamed Benabdallah, was named the World's Best Sommelier in 2025 and curates a list of 400 bottles to sit alongside the fire-led cooking.
Bangkok took second place through Gaggan, which was also named The Best Restaurant in Asia. Alchemist in Copenhagen, led by Rasmus Munk, placed third. The rest of the top ten runs Quintonil in Mexico City at No. 4, Wing and The Chairman in Hong Kong at Nos. 5 and 6, Kjolle in Lima at No. 7, Kadeau in Copenhagen at No. 8, Diverxo in Madrid at No. 9 and Plenitude in Paris at No. 10.
The highest placed restaurant in the United States is Atomix in New York, at No. 11 and named The Best Restaurant in North America. Its chef, Junghyun Park, received the Chefs' Choice Award, the one honour on the night voted for by fellow chefs. London's only entry is Ikoyi, at No. 48. Spain places four restaurants on the list: Etxebarri, Diverxo, Enigma in Barcelona at No. 29 and Elkano in Getaria at No. 33, itself a fellow Basque grill house.
This year's ranking covers 28 territories across six continents, with 11 new entries and five re-entries, and restaurants from 14 new cities. The Highest New Entry Award went to Tuju in Sao Paulo, which debuted at No. 16 and also took the Art of Hospitality Award. The other debuts include Meet the Bund in Shanghai, Al Gatto Verde in Modena, Masque in Mumbai, Ru Yuan in Hangzhou, Onjium in Seoul and Saint Peter in Sydney, which entered at No. 50 and was named The Best Restaurant in Oceania.
Kadeau took the Highest Climber Award, rising 33 places to No. 8. The five re-entries are led by La Colombe in Cape Town and include Schloss Schauenstein in Furstenau, Switzerland, a three-star dining room returning at No. 39 in the same week that Switzerland gained a fifth three-star restaurant elsewhere in the Alps. Fire, notably, runs through the lower half of the list as well: Al Gatto Verde, Elkano, Don Julio in Buenos Aires, Naar in Kasauli and Saint Peter all cook over flame in one form or another.
Ferran Adria received the Icon Award, recognising the El Bulli founder's work in culinary research and education through the El Bulli Foundation. The Best Female Chef Award went to Jessica Rosval of Al Gatto Verde in Modena, herself a wood-fire cook. Dej Kewkacha of Bangkok took the Best Pastry Chef Award, and Lesley Liu of Odette in Singapore, which placed No. 15, was named Best Sommelier. Naar, in the Himalayan foothills of India, won the Sustainable Restaurant Award, and Melbourne restaurant Yiaga received the One to Watch Award.
Voting is in the hands of The 50 Best Restaurants Academy, a body of over eleven hundred voters drawn from the restaurant trade worldwide. Its membership is split evenly between women and men, and at least a quarter of the panel is renewed annually. The professional services firm Deloitte adjudicates the voting independently. There are no published scoring criteria beyond the voters' own judgment, which is the list's strength and its standing argument: it measures reputation among peers and travelling diners, not inspection.
Judged on those terms, 2026 makes a clear statement. The world's best restaurant, by this count, is a farmhouse grill in a Basque village, with eight tables, a self-taught chef, and a menu that begins and ends with fire. After a decade in the top ten, Etxebarri did not change its idea to win. The list came to it.
Filed from the The Index desk.
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