The annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list is about luxury, precision and bucket-list experiences, but it’s also about getting customers to revalue food.
So this year, on the week of the prestigious awards ceremony in Turin, Italy, chef Pam Soontornyanakij discussed how her restaurant has helped change Bangkok’s dining landscape. Potong, which is No. 13 on this year’s list and earned Soontornyanakij the World’s Best Female Chef 2025 award, serves Thai-Chinese cuisine in Bangkok’s Chinatown.
During the World’s 50 Best Restaurants press conference, Soontornyanakij spoke about how it’s refreshing to see that locals in Thailand are now “willing to pay more for local cuisine.” In the recent past, she said, Thai customers were much more inclined to enjoy pricey meals at Japanese, Italian or French restaurants. But all over the world, chefs like Soontornyanakij are altering the conversation and the dining habits of the cities they call home.
“I want to use local ingredients and create authentic flavors but incorporate the skills and things that I learned in my career,’ says Soontornyanakij, who previously trained under Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York.
Soontornyanaki’s signature dish is roast duck. She gets the duck from Chachoengsao, about an hour and a half from Bangkok, and creates a hybrid of Beijing duck and French duck.
“I was trained very French and very Western,” she said. “But when I came back to Thailand, I felt like I wanted to create my own path and my own cuisine, a cuisine that really represents my heritage.”
One day after the press conference, at a Meet the Chefs gathering where honorees spoke candidly about the future of fine dining, chef JP Park of New York’s Atomix (No. 12 in this year’s list) talked about the research center in Seoul that he debuted last year.
“The reason why we opened the laboratory in Korea is to look for the foundation of Korean food,” Park says. “We can take something different, like Mexican flavors, and mix it with the Korean foundation to create something unique.”
Park, for example, makes his version of mole with gochujang. And his Seoul research center has been playing around with different Korean hot sauces. As always, Park and Atomix are R&Ding dishes that simultaneously taste familiar and brand new.
So much of fine dining, of course, is a balancing act.
Chef Eric Kragh Vildgaard of Copenhagen’s Restaurant Jordnær (No. 56 in this year’s extended 51-100 list) was asked about how he balances sustainability and luxury.
“That’s a good question because I am a luxurious kind of guy,” he said. “I could do better personally by using less luxurious ingredients. But since I have this desire to be a fine dining restaurant with only the best for the guests, I have to make some compromises. But very often, the best product comes from the most sustainable sourcing.”
Vildgaard spoke about the importance of Jordnær being a collaborative place where his team is happy and has influence on the restaurant.
“We push more for inclusiveness and being socially sustainable,” he said. “That for me is more important than being hyper-local. It’s more important that my chefs have a good life.”
(After the Meet the Chefs event, Vildgaard hopped on a shuttle bus with media instead of calling an Uber: “I’m saving money so I can buy more caviar,” he quipped.)
Being at the top of your game is grueling work, so balance is important. Chef Jorge Vallejo of Quintonil (No. 3 on this year’s list) wants to make it clear that long-term dedication is a key part of the recipe for success.
“We started in a very humble beginning,” he said. “We didn’t have any investors. We have 13 years already in the restaurant. It’s a project of life. It’s not a business. We consider Quintonil part of us.”
When asked what advice he has for chefs who want to strike out on their own, Vallejo stressed that putting in the work matters a lot.
“I started in the kitchen when I was 16 years old, and I opened my restaurant at the age of 30,” he said. “I think the younger generation needs to understand that it takes time. I believe that people need a commitment to learn, to take their journey, because cooking is not just about talent. It’s about discipline. It’s about ethics. It’s about teamwork. And if you don’t understand that you need people to build a team, it’s going to be very difficult for all of us to evolve.”
So where is fine dining headed in the future?
“I think it’s going to be very personal,” Atomix’s Park said. “It used to be more about soigné service. But now people are more excited to know about the chef, the philosophy behind the restaurant and the team.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
