|
Listen To Article
|
In March, the people who decide these things gathered in a ballroom at the Kerry Hotel in Hung Hom — the first time Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants had been staged in Hong Kong — and when the last two names were read, both belonged to the same city. The Chairman took the top spot. Wing took the one below it. Bangkok’s Gaggan, which had held the crown a year earlier, slid to third. Two restaurants in one building, in one city, in one country, closing out the most watched list in Asian dining.
A trend wobbles and corrects. What happened in that ballroom did neither. The wider list confirmed it: mainland China posted the strongest showing in its history, with Shanghai alone placing five restaurants and cities that had never appeared before walking in for the first time. The story everyone still tells about Asian food — that the serious cooking happens in Japan, that the thrilling cooking happens in Thailand — is now a decade out of date. The map has been redrawn. Most people are still reading the old one.
Start where the awards did. The Chairman is Danny Yip’s restaurant, and Cantonese cooking is its subject, but “Cantonese” undersells what happens there. Yip cooks recipes that don’t exist anywhere else, built on heritage rather than nostalgia, reaching back for luxury ingredients the trade had quietly forgotten and putting them to work in dishes he invented. It is preservation and invention at once, which is the hardest thing to pull off and the reason the room feels like a proof of concept for what Chinese cooking can be.
Upstairs — the same address — is Wing, and Vicky Cheng is doing something almost opposite. He calls it boundaryless: French technique deployed in homage to China’s eight great regional cuisines, the classical grammar of one tradition pressed into the service of another. A pigeon arrives smoked over sugarcane. Abalone, braised long and slow, is folded into a spring roll puffed to the point of collapse. Where Yip guards and rebuilds, Cheng dissolves the borders entirely. One building, two philosophies, the first and second best tables in Asia. You could spend an evening in each and understand more about where this cuisine is going than a week of reading would give you.
View this post on Instagram
Then there is Shanghai, which is less a scene than an engine. Taian Table holds the city’s only three Michelin stars — Stefan Stiller’s precise, ingredient-led modern cooking, the produce chosen first and the dish assembled around it. Meet the Bund, cooking Fujianese, was voted the best restaurant in mainland China outright. Ling Long carries the flag for modern Chinese with real conviction. And the momentum is still building: Fabula and Vivant both opened this year, the kind of arrivals that tell you the wave hasn’t crested. A city does not produce restaurants at this rate by accident. It does it because the talent, the money, and the confidence have all arrived in the same place at the same time.
There is one thread here worth pulling on carefully, because it upends an assumption. China’s Buddhist tradition has produced, over centuries, a vegetarian cuisine of real seriousness — and at the top end it is astonishing. Fu He Hui in Shanghai holds two Michelin stars for Chinese-Buddhist vegetarian cooking, and it is, without exaggeration, among the most refined meatless dining experiences anywhere on earth; a tasting menu where the absence of meat never once reads as absence. In Beijing, the plant-based Lamdre climbed thirty-three places this year to take the Highest Climber award — the single biggest leap on the list. For anyone who has learned to brace for the vegetarian table as a compromise, China quietly turns out to be one of the great places in the world to eat this way. Few people know it yet. That won’t last.
And the frontier keeps moving. Beijing’s Chef 1996 was the highest new entry on the list. Chengdu — Sichuan, chilli and numbing peppercorn, a cuisine most outsiders think they understand and don’t — landed its first-ever entry with Co-. This is the part that should make anyone paying attention lean forward: the story is no longer confined to Hong Kong and Shanghai. It is spreading into the regional cooking that makes Chinese food, genuinely, inexhaustible. There is no bottom to it.
View this post on Instagram
Here is where World Travel Magazine plants its flag: anyone still “doing” Asia through Tokyo and Bangkok is booking last decade’s itinerary. Those cities remain magnificent; that isn’t the point. The point is that the most exciting new chapter in Asian gastronomy is being written in China right now, this year, and 2026 is the year it stopped being arguable. August is an excellent window to go — the shoulder before autumn, the tables still bookable, the secret not yet fully out.
Book Wing while you still can, and order the pigeon. It comes to the table smoked over sugarcane, French in its execution and unmistakably Chinese in its soul, and somewhere in that single dish is the whole argument: a country that has stopped asking permission to be taken seriously, and simply set the table. Sit down before everyone else does. ◼
Subscribe to the latest edition now by clicking here.
© This article was first published online in July 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
