An aberration you say?

In Mexico City, Maximo Bistrot, no longer present on the 2016 list, held the position of #41 in 2015. On visiting Maximo Bistrot, we noticed something unusual. The restaurant we visited was not the restaurant shown in the photos on World’s 50 Best website. We have no clue where they found the photo of the restaurant they published. But it wasn’t Maximo Bistrot. For the record, here’s the photo we took of the dining room on our visit. Not likely to win any Architectural Digest awards for the Best Restaurant Design, is it?  And I will venture to say that the food I was served roughly matched the mediocrity of the décor.

Maximo Bistrot Dining Room

This list continues to baffle us. The 2015 and 2016 lists include two “stereotypical” Argentine steakhouses, La Cabrera and Don Julio. Hey, Argentine beef is great. And these two restaurants serve some decent steaks. But I find it odd that there’s no mention in the list of the elegantly decorated Le Grill that offers 45-day and 100-day dry aged Argentine beef. And the famed Brazilian churrascaría, Fogo de Chao, was snubbed as well.

The decor at Le Grill

Nothing I’ve said in this essay is scientific nor based on empirical data. It’s one man’s take on the subject. But I really don’t see how anyone could not question a list that ranks the restaurant, El Baqueano, as the 13th best restaurant in all of Latin America.

I look forward to gathering information that will discredit the validity of the list and the claimed “Academy” and add a little meat to the bones I’ve served up here. I’ll serve up the full cut of meat at a later date. And I look forward to providing my take in a future post about which restaurants we think should be on the list, that aren’t. All that’s coming between now and April of 2017, when we add the content for Peru to our website, and I will have sampled the fares of another half-dozen of the restaurants on the infamous list.