IN BELGIUM: CELEBRATING THE WORLD'S BEST RESTAURANTS

The World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards returned this year and took place in the Flanders region of Belgium, famous for its chocolate, diamonds and beer.

- RAAJ SANGHVI

There are only a couple of days each year when you will find the world's top restaurants bereft of their star chefs. Last Tuesday was one such day as chefs from across the world abandoned their kitchen duties and traveled to Antwerp to attend the World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards, better known in the culinary world as the Food Oscars.

The annual awards ceremony rotates around global gastronomic hotspots and cities such as London, New York, Bilbao and Singapore have played host in the past. After the pandemic-induced hiatus last year, the awards returned this year and took place in the Flanders region of Belgium, famous for its chocolate, diamonds and beer.

Each year at the awards function a new ranking of the fifty 'best' restaurants is declared based on the votes of almost 1000 anonymous global foodies. And at the week-long festivities, chefs meet up with their contemporaries, take part in collaborative dinners, organize marathon media interview sessions, eat, drink and celebrate gastronomy as they gear up for the reveal of the prestigious restaurant ranking that has the power to properl suppress their careers.

But this year was different. The pandemic and lockdowns across the world had left the restaurant industry facing an existential crisis. Most restaurants had made no money in the past year and many famous restaurants such as Tickets (the Michelin starred circus-themed restaurant in Barcelona run by famous chef Albert Adria) had shuttered, shocking the food world. Most chefs I spoke with in Antwerp said that survival had been their only goal in the past year and stressed on how difficult it was each month to ensure they can pay staff salaries.