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Don’t just take it from me. Consider these tweets from Marc Lepine, the chef-owner of Atelier, who was responding to my griping and the under-representation of Ottawa, and Desbrisay:

— Anne DesBrisay (@CapitalDining) March 2, 2016

Speaking of hard to justify, Rush bassist Geddy Lee and Vancouver actor Jason Priestley, listed as “gourmets/foodies,” cast ballots for their favourite restaurants. More seriously, so too did more than 20 chefs, including the chef/owners of Toqué!, Hawksworth, Joe Beef and Le Vin Papillon — four of the five restaurants that finished in the list’s top five. I presume that those judges were barred from voting for their own restaurants, which are, of course, outstanding places to eat. But still, their inclusion on the panel raises at the very least a sense of clubbiness, if not the spectre of conflict of interest.

In comparison, judges for a rival list, vacay.ca’s the Top 50 restaurants in Canada, are described as “objective food experts and connoisseurs who travel — a lot. They aren’t focused just on the dining scene in their hometown. They take the pulse of what’s going on in Canada, often by using their dining experiences around the world as a source of reference.” Mind you, on that list, Ottawa restaurants again strike me as under-represented. Only Atelier made the cut, and it ranked 48th of 50. Hopefully Lepine’s recent and second win of the Canadian Culinary Championship will help to nudge him up the lists.

For those who like to drill down, I’ve taken the nine Canadian restaurants which made it onto last December’s La Liste (a new ranking of the world’s 1,000 best restaurants, which I wrote about here) and cross-indexed them with the latest Canada’s top 100 and top 50 lists.