Few activities in life can go from fun to infuriating quite as quickly as picking a restaurant for a special occasion. When everyone in a group has competing tastes, interests, and food restrictions, discussions about dinner plans can quickly evolve into high-pressure negotiations.
To make matters even more complicated, diners frequently arrive at restaurants only to be let down by the menu.
“We have to wait there to eat something that we don’t get to choose, really, what it is. We only have a couple of choices. And we don’t know what any of them will taste like, or what’s good,” Jack Schlossberg, social media darling and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, said in a viral rant last summer.
“We’ll go eat there and it’ll be covered in sugar, and we’re gonna sit there for most of the time and wait for some guy to come up and ask us some questions,” he continued. “We have to read something in order to get the food first. You have to read to get your food. Why?”
Fortunately for Schlossberg and for the rest of us, the team at La Liste has released their 2025 list of the world’s best restaurants – ensuring that diners can select their next meals with confidence.
The annual rankings take a Metacritic-esque approach to compiling pre-existing restaurant reviews. More than 1,000 guidebooks and trusted publications are compiled into a database before prominent chefs rate the reliability of those reviews. After creating a weighted average of the professional reviews, La Liste integrates online customer reviews and gives them a 10% weight in the final rankings.
Click through to see the top restaurants in the world, according to La Liste. Each of these nine restaurants tied for first place, so this list is unranked.
