Where in the world should you eat dinner tonight? Well, if you want the best—the very best—head to Denmark.
A restaurant in Copenhagen, called Noma, was recently named the world’s top restaurant by Restaurant magazine.
Every year the magazine puts out a list of the 50 best restaurants in the world.
Noma held the top spot for three years, until it was bumped out of first place in 2013. This year it has reclaimed the title.
Noma gets thousands of requests for reservations each day.
Noma makes food that is connected with Nordic landscape. According to the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” website, the restaurant’s offerings include sea urchin toast, caramelized milk and cod liver, beef tartar (raw beef) and even ants. Its standout dish is winter potato cooked in fermented barley.
The website says Noma’s dishes “slap you in the face and make you feel glad to be alive.”
Number two on the list of the world’s best restaurants is El Celler de Can Roca, in Spain. A family-owned restaurant in Catalonia, it is run by brothers Joan and Josep Roca.
Their younger brother, Jordi, is the restaurant’s pastry chef (he makes the desserts). The magazine named Jordi the world’s best pastry chef, calling him “part chef, part architect and part magician.”
Here is how the website describes Jordi’s desserts:
Another stand-out dish arrives in the form of what appears to be uncooked dough, which is undulating on the plate. It turns out to be sourdough ice cream with cocoa pulp, fried lychee and sherry vinegar macaro; it’s both rule-breaking and delicious.
An Italian restaurant, Osteria Francescana, took third place.
There were no Canadian restaurants on this year’s list of the 50 world’s best. In 2010, a restaurant in Calgary called Rouge was ranked #60 and Langdon Hall, in Cambridge, Ontario, was ranked #77. Seven U.S. restaurants made the list, with two of them in the top 10.
The magazine selects restaurants based on recommendations from a panel of more than 900 food experts.
Related link:
View the entire list of the world’s 50 best restaurants on their website.
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Jonathan Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
What’s your favourite restaurant and what’s the best dish that they make? Why do you like it so much?
Reading Prompt: Elements of Style
The words that authors use to describe foods is often creative and colourful. Today’s article includes a few examples of this. Try to describe your favourite meal just like a professional food critic!
Primary
Identify some elements of style, including voice, word choice, and different types of sentences, and explain how they help readers understand texts (OME, Reading: 2.4).
Junior
Identify various elements of style – including word choice and the use of similes, personification, comparative adjectives, and sentences of different types, lengths, and structures – and explain how they help communicate meaning (OME, Reading: 2.4).
Intermediate
Identify various elements of style – including foreshadowing, metaphor, and symbolism – and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of texts (OME, Reading: 2.4).
Language Feature: Tense
Tense is the aspect of language that tells the reader when things take place. In general, there are three tenses: past, present, and future. Today’s article includes sentences written in the past and present tense. Find an example of these tenses in today’s article. Circle and label them. Finally, rewrite each example so that it is in the future tense.
