Foodie Vacation Paradise – Europe’s Top 100+ Restaurants Revealed

Alain Passard’s L’Arpège in Paris named ‘Best Restaurant in Europe’ on Opinionated about Dining’s 2017 Top 100+ European Restaurants List

New York, NY (May 15, 2017) – Opinionated About Dining (OAD), the leading source of global restaurant rankings for devout diners, has announced their 2017 “Top 100+ European Restaurants List’ with Alain Passard’s visionary restaurant, L’Arpège, reaching the number one spot for a second year. OAD’s Top 100+ European Restaurants List celebrates exemplary restaurants across Europe and has been published by Steve Plotnicki since 2012.

“The reason L’Arpège is able to be named the number one restaurant in Europe in the restaurant’s 31st year of existence is that Alain Passard’s cooking manages to be modern yet timeless. His eye for how to view an ingredient and how to figure out the best cooking method in order to capture its features is unparalleled. No wonder there are nine different restaurants on our 2017 list run by chefs who trained in his kitchen.” Steve Plotnicki

Starting in 2013, Plotnicki’s OAD has celebrated the publication of its Top 100+ European Restaurants List by organising a grand collaborative dinner. The announcement events have all included meals prepared by some of Europe’s most respected names including Rene Redzepi, Elena Arzak, Albert Adria, Quique Dacosta and Tim Raue.

This year’s announcement was made at the OAD Awards Dinner at Maison Blanche in Paris. Chefs including Rasmus Kofoed, Quique Dacosta, Mauro Colagreco, Atsushi Tanaka, Shinichi Sato, Alexander Couillon, Andreas Caminada, David Toutain prepared a dinner dedicated to ‘La Cuisine de Grand-Mère’ for OAD reviewers, journalists and chefs on the OAD Top 100+ Restaurants List.

The full list can be read on OAD’s website here.

‘Best Restaurant in Europe’ – L’Arpège, Alain Passard

‘Best New Restaurant’ – Lume, Luigi Taglienti

             ‘Highest New Entry’ – Aponiente, Ángel León

The OAD Best New Restaurant Award, awarded to Luigi Taglienti’s Lume in Milan, celebrates the highest ranking new restaurant on the Top 100+ European Restaurants List, which opened on or later than January 1, 2016. Eight restaurants this year were eligible for the award including Simon Rogan (Aulis at Fera), Enrico Bartolini (Enrico Bartolini ), Terry Giacomello (Inkiostro), Luigi Taglienti (Lume), Nicolas Darnauguilhem (Neptune), Paco Morales (Noor), Christophe Santaigne (Papillon) and Karlos Ponte and Luis Moreno (Taller).

“Given that in 2016 there were three restaurants from Italy who were nominated for the Best New Restaurant Award, followed by another three in 2017, it is fitting that this year’s winner is based in Milano. Luigi Taglienti has done a superb job of melding modern culinary technique with classical Milanese cooking, and this award is another significant piece of evidence that Italy is where some of the most progressive cooking in Europe is happening at the moment. “

“Due to it’s location in the extreme Southwest of Spain, a part of the country that is off the typical destination diner’s itinerary, it took a little bit longer than usual for our reviewers to discover Aponiente. But once word got out about Ángel’s restaurant, it quickly became one of the most important places to visit in Europe.”

Plotnicki credits the quality of the list to his superb reviewing panel, made up of some of the top destination diners and tastemakers in the world. “The breadth and determination of the OAD reviewing panel never ceases to amaze me. More than 25% of the restaurants on this year’s list are new entries, and the geographic diversity of those entries – ranging from Moscow to the east and Reykjavik to the west, shows how committed OAD’s reviewers are about experiencing as many important meals as possible.”

OAD 2017 TOP 100+ EUROPEAN  RESTAURANT LIST

(The full list 1-200 is available online, here)

History and Overview

OAD (Opinionated About Dining) was created by Steve Plotnicki in 2004. Originally functioning as a blog to document Steve’s dining exploits, Steve quickly identified widespread frustration with the reliability of dining guides on the market and recognized the need for a way to more accurately capture the movement of global dining culture. So in 2007, Steve shifted the focus of OAD from his own opinions to the results of a survey guide that would be shaped by many.

The initial OAD survey was sent to just a handful of Steve’s friends who shared his passion. Almost a decade later, OAD has evolved into an internationally respected dining guide brand that incorporates the opinions of nearly 5,000 of the world’s most passionate foodies and destination diners, regarding 16,000+ restaurants located throughout the world.

Noticing a big difference in the results of OAD’s survey results and the results of other guides on the market, Steve began producing unique collaborative dinners that featured chefs identified in the survey as either being up-and-coming or deserving of more attention from the dining community and press.

Jay Cheshes discusses OAD’s ranking system in the Wall Street Journal here.

About Steve Plotnicki

Steve Plotnicki’s passion for food has been an intrinsic part of his life. A native New Yorker and the son of a butcher, he was a successful guitarist and songwriter before co-founding Profile Records in 1981. In 1998, after success with groups such as Run-DMC and Rob Base, Steve sold his company, though still retains the music publishing catalogue and each year licenses a considerable amount of music for films, TV & commercials. He is also the owner of the television property, Robot Wars, which returned to the BBC2 in 2016.

Everyone is entitled to a have an opinion. But OAD’s philosophy is that all opinions are not equal. Unlike other more egalitarian survey guides on the market, OAD believes that experienced opinions generate more accurate conclusions. So to intensify the accuracy of the results of its surveys, OAD emphasizes the experience of the voting panel as well as each individual voter.

First, the panel of voters that contributes to OAD surveys is lightly curated to ensure that it consists mainly of globetrotting, highly culinary-literate reviewers that can place their experience within the context of global trends.

OAD then ensures that, within the voting pool, the more experienced the diner the more of an impact their opinion has on the results of the survey. Each voter’s results are run through a proprietary algorithm that takes into account the quantity and quality of the restaurants each has visited (in conjunction with a number of other factors), which results in their being given a score. That score determines how much weight each participants’ votes have on the results.