I ate 3,000 meals for my ‘best of London restaurants’ list – and I hope you disagree with it | Jonathan Nunn

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Almost 24 years ago, a small British food magazine called Restaurant assembled an all-star panel – made up of Gordon Ramsay, John Torode, Aldo Zilli and 65 other food guys – to adjudicate on the world’s most stupid question: what is the best restaurant on the planet? It didn’t matter that no judge had been to all the restaurants on the shortlist, or that two of the judges happened to be Jeremy Clarkson and Roger Moore – what the editors of Restaurant understood is that people love a list, and if you order a group of restaurants from 50-1 and throw a party, people might take it seriously.

“This could run and run,” the editors wrote in their intro, half hoping. They were right. Within two decades, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants had gone from what critic Jay Rayner described as a “terribly successful marketing exercise” to an insurgent alternative to the ossified Michelin Guide, solidifying the reputations of El Bulli, the Fat Duck and then Noma as the “world’s best restaurant”.

Since then, we – by which I mean food writers, journalists and general punters – have become obsessed with restaurant lists. On the premium end of things, you have institutions like The World’s 50 Best and Michelin itself, which will announce the starred restaurants for its Saudi Arabia guide next week. On the other, there is – well, everything else: The Best 22 Date Night Restaurants in London Right Now, The Hot 50: the most popular Mancheseter restaurants and bars, The 17 best restaurants in Glasgow you simply have to try and its sequel, The 18 best restaurants in Glasgow you simply have to try.

During the 2010s, the list overtook the review as the main form of restaurant writing, taking advantage of internet search-engine optimisation, publications’ smaller budgets, and the alliance of journalism with PR, which allowed writers to list restaurants they hadn’t paid for, or necessarily been to. The success of the list, and the decline in criticality, has precipitated restaurant writing’s downfall. Today, one of the most powerful forces for restaurant recommendations is the Instagram duo Topjaw, whose questions to chefs – “best restaurant in London?”, “best curry in Manchester?, “most underrated restaurant in New York?’ – are nothing more than the list cleverly updated for short-form video.

If it sounds as if I consider myself above all this then I can reassure you: I absolutely do not. I started out writing restaurant lists myself for the now-defunct site Eater London, mainly concentrating on London’s outer boroughs, where restaurants tend to serve their own neighbourhoods and not get included on lists. This week, for my own publication Vittles, I published a larger, even more ridiculous list of 99 restaurants that took me two years to eat through, write and whittle down from about 3,000 meals eaten out over the last seven years. I could tell you that it’s an attempt to connect this vital part of the London hospitality industry with its more central scene of restaurants – the ones with Michelin stars, private dining rooms and, in one case, its own private island – and accurately reflect the bewildering diversity of London’s food culture. But really, I just like writing lists and people love reading them – and especially, arguing about them.

The central argument of a “best of” list contains a problem, one that I kept running into while writing my own list: what do we really mean by “best”? At some point, the World’s 50 Best moved away from its eclectic first list, which included shepherd’s pie and ketchup at the Ivy alongside a restaurant inside a giant fish tank in Dubai, and started to laud the same type of restaurant. In the end, it was itself accused of becoming a homogenising and unrepresentative force for bad. But when we talk about “best”, why can’t we meaningfully compare, say, the Ritz to a fish and chip shop? Whose idea of what “quality” means do we deem to be important? Is it possible to acknowledge that while the work that goes into the creation of a tasting menu and the work that goes into nourishing a community may not be the same, they do have an equivalent importance and require a similar level of skill?

I’ve loved discussing these questions with people. Recently, I have been asking everyone I know what they consider to be the five best restaurants where they live without worrying about what a “best restaurant” looks like. The answers have never been the same, or given for the same reasons. It might be the restaurant they take a loved one to on a special occasion, or the restaurant that they eat at so often they don’t need to order. It might be a place that has the capacity to transform an ingredient into something completely new, or a place that makes the same thing over and over again, aiming for perfection. When I asked my dad for his list, he pointed to Ognisko, the Polish restaurant he had his birthday at, Survivor, his go-to Jamaican takeaway, and a pie and mash shop which reminds him of his childhood. Each one, I think, is an equally valid interpretation of “best”. Each one reflects an important experience of London.

This is why my favourite restaurant lists tend not to be the ones like Michelin or World’s 50 Best that have been written by committee, but the personal ones. A personal list shows up the inherent ridiculousness of the enterprise – it can no longer even fake a veneer of objectivity. There is the late Richard Collin’s New Orleans Underground Gourmet, which wrote about French fine dining next to po’ boys and eventually got embroiled in a city-wide scandal over Collin’s evaluation of a spaghetti sauce. There are Jonathan Gold’s lists, which, for a whole generation, via Gold’s opinions, defined the contours of Los Angeles dining. These lists tend to be passionate, strongly argued and completely unreasonable – they are there, hopefully, not there to cement a fake consensus, but to sharpen our own sense of what we believe quality means. Ultimately, the best thing a list can do is to force us to make lists of our own.