Food & Wine magazine published its 2026 Global Tastemakers Awards this week, and the top spot went to Ikoyi in London. The restaurant, which sits in St. James's and is run by chef Jeremy Chan, earned the recognition for what the magazine described as a singular combination of West African, East Asian, and British culinary influences. Time Out London food and drink editor Leonie Cooper called dining there 'an experience from another world.'
The selection process involves more than 400 experts, from working chefs to travel journalists, who nominate candidates across categories. The final ranking is made by the Food & Wine Global Advisory Board. This year, the board shifted its focus away from traditional haute cuisine and toward restaurants with a distinct cultural identity, where dishes are shaped by memory and migration rather than classical technique alone.
The Full Top 10 List
The 2026 list reflects a genuinely global spread. Second place went to Maido in Lima, Peru, which specializes in Peruvian-Japanese Nikkei cuisine. Third was CieL Dining in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The remaining seven spots were taken by Arami in La Paz, Bolivia; Potong in Bangkok, Thailand; Naar in Darva, India; Botanico in Mexico City; Roscioli Salumeria con Cucina in Rome; Lunch Lady in Vancouver, Canada; and Saint Peter in Sydney, Australia.
What stands out about this list is how few of the restaurants are in the cities that typically dominate these rankings. No New York, no Tokyo, no Paris in the top ten. The board's stated focus on cultural identity over technical refinement has produced a list that reads more like a guide to where food is most alive right now than a ranking of who has the most Michelin stars.
What This Means for How We Cook
At Jackson Laurie School of Recipes, we pay attention to these lists not because they tell us what to cook, but because they reflect how the conversation around cooking is shifting. The emphasis on memory, migration, and local ingredients is something we've built into our own approach here in Florida, where the food culture draws from Cuban, Caribbean, Southern, and Latin American traditions in ways that don't fit neatly into any classical framework.
Ikoyi's win is a reminder that the most interesting cooking right now is happening at the intersection of cultures, not at the top of any single tradition. That's worth thinking about the next time you're deciding what to cook for dinner.
