They’re Chasing the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. And They Have Opinions.

10 Minute read

17 Aug 2026

Joel Stein

Writer

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Meet the obsessive diners whose pursuit of the annual ranking has reshaped their travel, their palates, and their standards.

As with all superheroes, each has a different origin story.

For his 21st birthday, Hong Kong native Kevin Chan’s girlfriend took him to Susur Lee’s restaurant in Toronto, where Chan was studying. He glanced at the tasting menu and couldn’t believe it. “I looked at the price and said, ‘Let’s leave. We can do Chinese barbecue pork for $10,’” Chan says.

She convinced him to stay. After the meal, he was even more certain that fine dining was a waste. “I hated the foie gras. It’s sweet and rich and savory. I put the black dots on my beef carpaccio onto the side and asked the waiter if he could remove them. He said, ‘You don’t eat black truffle?’” When Chan found out how much truffles cost, he piled them up and put them in his mouth. They tasted worse than he assumed they would.

But in the weeks that followed, Chan kept thinking about the truffle and foie gras, wondering why he had never encountered those flavors in Chinese cooking.

Ilaria Verde’s eating disorder was so bad that for one long stretch, she wouldn’t eat anything other than yogurt and tomatoes. She had moved to London, and her new friends, unaware of her issues, invited her to Le Gavroche. “The opportunity to eat such visually stunning, delicious and refined food – with all those incredible new textures – meant that eating was suddenly worth the calories. I wanted to chase that feeling. Even my home-cooked meals had to be beautifully plated,” she says.

After growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family that kept kosher, Paul Grinberg was in Girona, Spain, in 2011 with his new girlfriend. Trying to impress her, he made a reservation at El Celler de Can Roca. “It blew us away. And as we were leaving, I saw the plaque at the entry that it was one of the world’s 50 Best Restaurants.”

Whatever their reasons for embarking on this impossible journey, each has attempted to eat at all of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Marketing executive Jeffrey Merrihue completed the list on April 28, 2013. He claims to have beaten Chan to it by one day, though Chan disputes this. It was a global competition not unlike the 1989 Tour de France, only with even more calories. They had become friends in the process, meeting at some of the restaurants to eat together.

When I called Merrihue this summer, he was in Bilbao, having just gone to Asador Etxebarri (currently number two on the list) for the tenth time. The next day, he planned to go to six different places known for making the creamy, Santander-style tortilla española. There is, among all the people who chase the list, a fusion of obsessive compulsion and fear of missing out. Most of them travel a ton for their jobs and have abused not only their travel expense accounts but also their actual travel. “I saw that I was at 35 out of 50 and literally crafted my clients’ schedule to get the last 15. The last was in South Africa, so I really had to invent a reason to go there,” says Merrihue of his job at Accenture.

More amazing than the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve dropped on restaurant meals or the time they’ve spent on airplanes getting to them is the amount of food they’re able to consume.

When I called Grinberg, who, in 2016, became the first person to eat at all 100 of the World’s 50 Best, he had just gotten home from a 65th-birthday trip to Europe during which he ate at 48 Michelin-starred restaurants. On one trip to southeastern France, he ate at 10 restaurants with three Michelin stars in five days. “I couldn’t get out of bed for 24 hours,” he says of his marathon.

Normally, if a restaurant is less than three miles away, he walks there. But each of those French restaurants was hours apart by car, so he was unable to expend calories. He has no regrets.

“Once, at a three-star restaurant in Spain that I was visiting for the first time, I had such a long, emulsion-heavy menu that by the final four courses I simply couldn’t eat any more,” says Verde. “A friend who worked there told me he had asked the chef to pipe the emulsions that went onto my dishes into a separate jar. It weighed nearly 250 grams. Every diner was essentially served an entire jar of mayonnaise.”

None of the people I spoke to have vomited from overeating, which puts them ahead of people I’ve dined with at a top-five restaurant where the chef gave us extra dishes. Paul Grinberg, however, was hit with food poisoning from lunch just as he arrived at Christopher Coutanceau in La Rochelle, France, for dinner. He tried to power through. “It was really strong seafood. Barnacles. After four of the 20 courses, I started moving shit around the plate. I told them, ‘I’m so sorry I have to go.’ I barely made it to the car before I threw everything up,” he says.

But almost always, they finish their meals. And as obsessives, they not only document all the dishes they eat but need to tell the world about them. Chan wrote a 2015 book published in China called Fine Dining Explorer, which sought to expand the Chinese palate. Merrihue’s Xtreme Foodies Substack has more than 22,000 subscribers. Verde’s Instagram, @wonderfoodie, has nearly 8,000 followers.

Instagram has changed fine dining for all of the 50 Best chasers. “It has had a big effect on choosing where to eat. The camera eats first, so I’m intrigued to visit a restaurant if I see that they have an Instagrammable dish,” says Melissa Tse, whose @supertastermel account has 60,000 followers.

But most of these superheroes hate the gram. “Lots of restaurants are trying to become too trendy and gimmicky to get Instagrammers,” says Chan, who has eaten at only 44 of the current World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which is a pretty weak form of a boycott. In 2013, he estimated that five restaurants on the list were more concerned with presentation than quality. Now he puts the number at 20. Plus, the community of people sharing critical information is disappearing. “I was a food blogger. There were lots of people who would read them and give their comments. Those days are gone. No one reads food blogs anymore. It’s Instagram photos and click click click,” he says.

The complaints I kept hearing about restaurants on the current list included luxification. “Wagyu, truffle, caviar, more caviar. I forgot. Did I mention caviar? Everyone lies and says it’s from Russia or Germany, but it’s all from China. It’s the biggest scam,” says Merrihue. Also, Japanification, which is especially rampant on the West Coast. “Everything is yuzu this or miso that.”

They also resent globalized, homogenized, copycat dishes, a complaint I share even after eating at only five restaurants on the current list and three of the “Best of the Best” that were retired after reaching number one. Verde, who somehow ate at 482 restaurants last year, can recognize the rest of the menu as soon as the first dish appears. “The same forgettable snacks, the same foams – I truly wish chefs would finally retire the white foam, which mostly evokes dish soap – the unnecessary use of smoke, and the ubiquitous addition of caviar, often tasteless and where it’s not needed. The worst part is getting a selection of uninspired petits fours at the end of the meal, like a predictable lemon gelée or a cube of boring, overly sweet fudge – like a bad goodbye kiss after a lukewarm date,” she says.

Merrihue agrees. “The format has become so standardized, it’s really annoying. You get four amuse-bouche that come out on a rock or a tree or a bush. They tell you what order to eat them in, and you can’t remember. The appetizers are four more little goodies, but this time they get their own little platelet. You’re up to eight dishes, and you can’t tell what they are. Then you get a reductionist bit of turbot, and it comes with that little pitcher of sauce that you can video while they pour the green sauce on your lobster. Then a little palate cleanser, a little grapefruit sorbet. Then comes the worst of them all. Three desserts. I don’t know a human being on earth who wants three desserts. Then the petits fours. Are you kidding me? After all that, you get a chocolate, a caramel, and a gummy bear.”

They also agreed on the best restaurants: César in New York City and Alchemist in Copenhagen. Some also listed DiverXO in Madrid, Plénitude in Paris, and La Marine on the French island of Noirmoutier. They suggested avoiding Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower.

And they say all this fine dining has changed them, and not just as eaters. “It made me have more attention to detail. I will be picky about movies,” says Chan. “I’ve got in my mind how things can be improved. Even when I go to a supermarket. They could organize things better. You strive for perfection in your life. That’s what fine dining tries to do. Now I need to import my own water to make my sushi.” Maybe it hasn’t turned them into superheroes. Maybe it’s just turned them into critics.