Maybe the first thing you should know about the World's 50 Best Restaurants list is that it contains 100 restaurants. If you would like a better metaphor for the contradictions and puzzlements of what has become the restaurant world's most influential ranking, I'm not sure I can find one. Nevertheless, if you pay any attention to chefs and restaurants, you will have heard of the List, which, in 14 years of existence, has gone from an obscure curiosity to dominating the dining conversation, even eclipsing the Michelin Guide, that grand-père of restaurant judgment. For better and for worse, there can be no doubt that the World's 50 Best has become the ranking of The Way We Eat Now—or at least The Way We Talk About Eating Now.

Like many lists, the 50 Best was born in the offices of a magazine—Britain's Restaurant, in 2002—though it has since become its own enterprise. Until this year, it was technically The World's 50 Best Restaurants sponsored by S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna, voted on by the Diners Club World's 50 Best Restaurants Academy, presented alongside the Veuve Clicquot World's Best Female Chef Award, the World's Best Pastry Chef Award sponsored by Cacao Barry, and so on. Perhaps tired of it being shorthanded as “the San Pellegrino list,” the organization dropped the water company's title rights this year, though it remains a sponsor.

Of course, it's only fair to note that the Michelin Guide was and is named for a tire company. The organizers of the 50 Best insist that they are not in competition with Michelin, but it's nearly impossible not to consider one without the context of the other. Philosophically, practically, even geographically, the 50 Best is, among other things, a rebuke to Michelin and its old-world—which is to say, classically French—values. In broad terms, if Michelin is the list of white tablecloths, the 50 Best is the list of no tablecloths; if Michelin rewards stolid excellence, the 50 Best rewards novelty; if Michelin's heart lies in France, the 50 Best's theoretically encompasses the entire world.

The List's first No. 1, in 2002, was Ferran Adrià's El Bulli, helping to spur both the global influence of Spanish avant-garde cooking and the kind of deeply theatrical, multicourse tasting menus that the 50 Best continues to most prominently reward. Lately, the top three spots have rotated among Copenhagen's Noma; Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy; and the current No. 1, El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain. A French restaurant has never held the top spot—an honor awarded at a lavish ceremony that has always been held in London. This year it will take place on June 13 in New York City, a move designed to emphasize the List's global reach.

Arriving and evolving in the era of social media and a nonstop circuit of culinary conferences and festivals, the 50 Best has become a kind of house list for the cult of chef as artist and personality. (Although its makers insist that they publish a ranking of restaurants, not chefs, one glance at the gallery of winners on its website—a checkerboard of predominantly white-male head shots—tells a different story.) Michelin's famous definition of a three-star restaurant is “worth a special journey,” but it's the World's 50 Best that has been embraced by a generation of eaters for whom dining experiences have become the primary reason to travel. Or just a chance to chatter: It is the list of the Instagrammed, the Snapchatted, and the Status Updated. I have a friend who religiously follows the World's 50 Best. He keeps up with menu changes, openings, and changes in reputation the way others once followed the movie or book business. It does not strike him as the least bit odd that he has never actually eaten at any of the restaurants.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

Why a restaurateur might want to get on the List is obvious: Its effects can be transformative. Winners find their profiles instantly raised. It was its climb up the ladder of the 50 Best that turned Noma, like El Bulli before it, into the most influential restaurant in the world—and, not coincidentally, filled its reservation book in perpetuity. Nor are the effects limited to the top. “We felt an immediate impact: the amount of e-mails, the amount of phone calls,” says Esben Holmboe Bang of Oslo's Maaemo, which climbed last year from No. 79 to No. 64. “And we're not even in the top 50.”

“People who are into the list are very perseverant,” says David McMillan of Montreal's Joe Beef, which debuted at No. 81 last year. “You get some pretty OCD foodies: five e-mails, eight calls, begging for an eleven-fifteen reservation. There are people who just want to notch restaurants on their belts.”

And once a restaurant is on the List, that restaurant tends to stay on the List. In a self-perpetuating cycle, the ranking begets articles begets visitors begets social media begets votes.

The World's 50 Best's methodology is a hybrid of two very different ways of thinking about rankings: On the one hand, there's the American love of a survey—the belief in consensus that undergirds guides like Zagat and Yelp. On the other is the European ideal of the expert, reflected in the fantasy of all-knowing, all-seeing Michelin ninjas roaming the countryside in their cloaks of invisibility. In other words, while the List is generated by voting, it's only among a smallish group of culinary elites—just shy of 1,000.

The elites, in this case, belong to three groups: chefs, journalists, and so-called gastronauts. (The best thing that can be said about that term is that it is not foodies, though it still brings to mind a band of miniaturized scientists sailing their way through somebody's colon in a tiny spaceship.) Some gastronauts are from sectors of the food business—wine importers, restaurant consultants—whose jobs allow them to eat widely. Most, however, are simply civilian members of the very rich. They are both the List's authors and its customers, the people for whom each year's edition serves as a map for future travel, future dining, and future list-making. For the rest of us, their verdicts are something to parse, debate, and salivate over.

Each voter—or “panelist”—is asked to rank seven restaurants at which he or she has eaten in the past 18 months: as many as four from their home region and at least three from anywhere else. The panelists are split among 27 gerrymandered regions around the globe. Some are small (France, Germany), some significantly larger (Africa). The U.S. and Canada are divided into three regions, each with 36 voters, while China and Korea, neither an insignificant culinary culture, share a single set of 36. This is one clue that the World's 50 Best defines world only slightly more expansively than the World Series does.