London Star Clare Smyth No Longer Holds ‘World’s Best Female Chef’ Title

A troubling title leaves London for New York City

World’s 50 Best Restaurants has named Daniela Soto-Innes, the trailblazing New York City chef behind Cosme and Atla, ‘World’s Best Female Chef’ for 2019. Soto-Innes succeeds London’s Clare Smyth, who won the award in 2018 after maintaining three Michelin stars at Gordon Ramsay’s flagship Restaurant Gordon Ramsay for eight years, and becoming the first British female chef to run a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the process. Her debut solo restaurant Core, in Notting Hill, has since garnered two Michelin stars of its own at the first time of asking; it did not, however, make the World’s 50 Best Restaurant list or its 51-100 runners’ up, making Smyth the world’s best female chef but not one of the world’s 100 best head chefs, by the awards’ own internal logic. Soto-Innes’ award is notable in this regard: 2017 winner Dominique Crenn, like her successor Smyth, is yet to see her now three-Michelin-starred restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco make the top 50, but Soto-Innes’ Cosme is actually on the list, at number 25. While Smyth and others suggest that the award does important work spotlighting a problem in spite of its many limitations, its persistence is matched only by the persistence of its criticism for second-classery, tokenism, and othering of female chefs’ achievements; for the absurd, gendered categorisation of greatness that reproduces inequalities in the restaurant industry; and for the fact that there is, quite simply, no ‘World’s Best Male Chef.’ [World’s 50 Best]

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