“I have friends who are smart, interesting guys who lose their shit over getting No. 1,” the chef David Chang said. Illustration by Brian Rea

In the colonnaded courtyard of the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, a former Jesuit boarding school in Mexico City, under a grove of magnolia trees hung with punched-tin stars, more than five hundred people had gathered to learn which restaurants would be proclaimed the fifty best in Latin America. The party was meant to be attended with a drink in one hand, a phone in the other. There were a multitude of bars: wine by Robert Mondavi, tequila by Casa Dragones, rum by Zacapa, champagne by Veuve Clicquot. The Modelo stand was manned by a team of studs in suspenders. Water sommeliers—white tie, white gloves, wearing tasting cups on silver chains—circulated with magnums of San Pellegrino. Inside the program, the event’s organizers, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, had enclosed a card. It listed Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram information and a hashtag, #LatAm50Best.The password for the 50 Best Wi-Fi network was Mexico2015, which had the advantage of being both dryly factual and sounding like a tourist-board come-on.

The guests were drawn mainly from three constituencies: chefs, journalists, and businesspeople—a triad that thrived as interdependently as corn, beans, and squash. The chefs ran the restaurants, which the journalists wrote about, promoting the businesspeople’s interests, so that they plowed more money into the chefs’ projects, which yielded fodder for the journalists. Onstage, the host was announcing the winners in descending order. (Seeking to extend the brand, in 2013 the World’s 50 Best Restaurants launched separate lists for Asia and Latin America.) Everyone talked through the presentation, but the furious networking only heightened the excitement.

“It’s very difficult to get on the list, and it’s very difficult to get off,” an event planner said to a restaurant consultant.

“You have to work like crazy,” a chef told a reporter. “You have to do new things all the time, you have to focus on the food, you have to talk to the press.”

The lights went down, and a video extolling the gastronomy of Mexico began.

“We believe that Peru has made more efforts,” a government official at one of the tables remarked, of the P.R. offensive. “Now, in Mexico, we have a policy for culinary diplomacy.”

Rodolfo Guzmán, a chef from Chile, ascended the stage to collect the Chefs’ Choice Award. At Boragó, his restaurant in Santiago, he uses mostly indigenous ingredients, relying on more than two hundred foragers and small producers to supply the raw materials for dishes such as venison tartare with maqui berries and a soup of Patagonian rainwater served on a bed of moss. Guzmán had the dreamy, doomed look of a duellist (or, as more than one woman in the audience pointed out, of Johnny Depp). Unlike his peers, who pumped fists and garlanded themselves in saffron-colored raw-silk scarves furnished by LesConcierges, “the premier provider of global lifestyle services and solutions,” he seemed abashed to be standing on a podium, under a giant projection of his own head shot.

“Fantastic!” Jeffrey Merrihue, a marketing expert and “semi-pro” epicure, who had eaten in forty-one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, yelled to his wife, who had been to twenty-eight. “Where I was having lunch today, he was eating by himself, so I sent him the most expensive fucking glass of red wine in the whole restaurant and went over and had dessert with him!” He posted a picture to his social-media feeds, which also featured a shot of his young son “in a hotel bathrobe after falling into a fish pond at a 1 Michelin star restaurant in Warwick, England.”

Juan Pablo Ballesteros Canales was teetering on a stool. Ballesteros is the great-grandson of Dionisio Mollinedo Hernández, who, in 1912, founded Café de Tacuba, one of Mexico City’s classic restaurants. In 2013, Ballesteros opened Limosneros, a high-end but straightforwardly Mexican restaurant in a colonial building in the city’s centro histórico. He had poured everything into making Limosneros worthy of his heritage, restoring the building’s stone walls and brick ceilings, seeking out Huichol embroideries to hang on the walls, designing light fixtures that resembled guacamole pestles.

He drank a single malt from a snifter, grimacing. “We plan to be open for a hundred years!” he said, and looked around. “Is this real? No, it’s not real. It’s gossip.”

He scythed a hand through the air—as if to say, “And I mean all of it”—and continued, “Mexico’s got such richness that nobody ever expresses. What amount of subjectivity should you put on that tortilla?”

He took another sip. “They’re businessmen. They blow-jobbed their way through this. Pseudo critics—are they allowed to judge?

“I know the fisherman, I know the guy who killed the pig, I know the cow-slayer who tastes every dish before it’s on any menu. What I’m saying is, there are really great restaurants, but it’s all el dedazo,” he continued, using a Spanish word that refers, in Mexico, to “the big finger” that manipulates the political system.

The first World’s 50 Best Restaurants list appeared in 2002, in Restaurant, a British trade magazine. (William Reed Business Media, its parent company, also publishes such titles as Convenience Store and The Grocer.) “We were a bunch of youngish, stroppy food fans,” Chris Maillard, an editor at the time, recalled. “We played terrible indie music loudly in the office, which was on Carnaby Street, lunched anywhere from the local pub to the occasional more upmarket restaurant that would grudgingly give us a free meal, and we were very much not members of the traditional culinary establishment.”

The idea, Maillard thinks, was hashed out in the Shaston Arms, a London pub that does not serve food.

“Why are all restaurant guides awful?” somebody said.

“How difficult can it be?”

“Why don’t we do our own?”

“I know, let’s do one for the entire world!”

“I live in Atlanta, but I think you meant where am I from originally.” Facebook

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The project was intended as a onetime stunt. It nonetheless had some feeling behind it. At a moment when low-cost airlines had rendered Portugal as accessible as Portsmouth, Maillard and his colleagues considered the idea of restricting the conversation to a single geographical area (in the manner of the Michelin guide) an anachronism. They were also put off by Michelin’s gray-faced sensibility, its predilection for “daunting cheffy masterpieces in near-silent rooms,” as Maillard has said. Where would you want to go, they asked themselves, if you weren’t French, rich, or old? “We put the list together by calling contacts and friends all over the world and eliciting recommendations, then added in our own suggestions, and ordered it in a rather slapdash manner,” Maillard recalled. “Which all sounds a bit loose and random, but, in its first year, the list wasn’t intended to be at all definitive.”

ElBulli, a three-Michelin-star restaurant, came in first. But many of the winners—a Canadian B.Y.O.B. farmhouse, an open-air meat buffet in Kenya—embodied a more capacious notion of merit. Some of them had average food in an exceptional setting. Or they were flaky but did one great dish. In the guise of authoritativeness, the editors were making an argument: that fun mattered; that apricot-colored napkins folded into bishops’ hats didn’t; that inspiration could trump technique; that pleasure was as worthwhile a pursuit as perfection; that the Ambrosia Burger at Nepenthe (No. 34), a café on a cliff in Big Sur, could hold its own—at least, as an experience—with the gargouillou at Michel Bras (No. 40). Their selection was provocative, if not totally persuasive. Their twelfth-favorite restaurant in the world was Tangerine, a Casbah-themed Philadelphia restaurant that closed in 2009.