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A handful of the world's newly crowned 50 best restaurants are in the U.S.

Chefs prepare food at Mexico's Dinner With Enrique Olvera And Jordi Roca during Food Network & Cooking Channel New York City Wine & Food Festival presented By FOOD & WINE at Cosme NYC on October 15, 2015 in New York City. Cosme is one of six U.S. honorees on the 2021 list of the world's 50 best restaurants.
Mike Pont
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Getty Images for NYCWFF
Chefs prepare food at Mexico's Dinner With Enrique Olvera And Jordi Roca during Food Network & Cooking Channel New York City Wine & Food Festival presented By FOOD & WINE at Cosme NYC on October 15, 2015 in New York City. Cosme is one of six U.S. honorees on the 2021 list of the world's 50 best restaurants.

A prestigious panel of more than 1,000 culinary experts has released its annual list of the world's best restaurants, after a rigorous voting process that we can only hope involved a lot of taste-testing.

The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2021 awards were handed out Tuesday at a ceremony in Antwerp, Belgium, which organizers called a "key milestone in the ongoing revival of the restaurant sector" after last year's pandemic-related hiatus. (Separately, its recovery program has raised some $1.29 million for the restaurant industry since it launched last May.)

The organization calls the ranking "more than just a list," rather a "celebration of the universality of cuisines." Though we're also very interested in who made the roster, which you can find here.

Denmark dominated, with the top two spots going to Copenhagen restaurants Noma and Geranium. The other top 10 eateries — mostly boasting one-word names and bright, abstract-looking dishes — are located in Spain, Peru, Sweden, Singapore, Mexico and Hong Kong.

Six American restaurants made the list, representing the apparent best of New York and California. They're led by New York City's Mexican-inspired Cosme, which ranks 22nd. Here are the other U.S. names:

  • Benu in San Francisco
  • SingleThread in Healdsburg, Calif.
  • Atomix in New York
  • Le Bernardin in New York
  • Atelier Crenn in San Francisco
  • The World's Best 50 Restaurants — despite its name — has also released a ranking of thenext best50 restaurants, bringing the total to 100. And it's bestowed a bunch of individual awards for specific chefs and establishments to watch.

    Our dream post-pandemic bucket list just got a lot longer.


    This story originally appeared in the Morning Edition live blog.

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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    Rachel Treisman (she/her) is a writer and editor for the Morning Edition live blog, which she helped launch in early 2021.