Food

In 2013, David Carter was running the floor at Roka, the upscale Japanese robatayaki restaurant in Mayfair, when he decided to spend his savings on something unrelated to sushi: a large smoker, bought in Texas and shipped home to London. He started selling brisket off that smoker at Street Feast’s Dalston Yard market, one stall among dozens competing for the same crowd of beer-holding Londoners. Twelve years, a permanent Shoreditch address, and one Michelin Bib Gourmand later, that stall is Smokestak — and it’s done as much as any single restaurant to define what London barbecue actually tastes like.

Paris has no shortage of gelato shops chasing the Italian crowd, but the city’s own ice cream tradition still runs through one address on the Île Saint-Louis: Maison Berthillon, founded in 1954 by Raymond Berthillon, who started selling his wife’s family recipe out of the ground floor of what was already a café his in-laws ran. More than 70 years later, it’s still family-run, still made in small batches on the premises, and still closed two days a week — rules most businesses this famous would have abandoned long ago.

Belgium has a word the French don’t: fritkot, the freestanding kiosk where frites are fried, sauced, and handed over in a paper cone within minutes of your order. At Place Jourdan in Etterbeek, one of Brussels’ European Quarter squares, that kiosk is Maison Antoine — open since 1948, still run by descendants of the couple who started it, and still cited by locals as the city’s reference point for what a frituur should be. The fries themselves follow a method that’s genuinely different from the ones sold at most fast-food counters: fried twice, in beef fat more often than not, from a potato variety bred specifically for the job.

Order a “crêpe” in Paris and a Breton will quietly correct you if what lands on the table is folded around ham and an egg. In Brittany, that’s a galette — made with buckwheat flour, never sugar — and the distinction has held for centuries at Breizh Café, the crêperie that opened on Rue Vieille du Temple in Le Marais in 2010 and has been drawing lines down the block ever since. Founder Bertrand Larcher built his menu on a simple rule his Fougères-born mother taught him: buckwheat is for the savory course, wheat is for dessert, and the two never share a griddle.

Seventeen years ago, a two-storey shop on a residential strip in Sham Shui Po did something no Hong Kong dim sum house had done before: it walked away with a Michelin star in the very first Hong Kong & Macau guide, in 2010, while charging less than HK$50 a plate. The headlines wrote themselves — “the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal” — and Tim Ho Wan has been feeding that reputation, and feeding Sham Shui Po, ever since. The star eventually gave way to a Bib Gourmand as Michelin’s criteria shifted for casual eateries, but the 2026 Michelin Guide Hong Kong & Macau, published this year, kept the Fuk Wing Street branch on its list for the 17th consecutive year — a run very few restaurants anywhere can claim.

That consistency matters more than usual right now. Tim Ho Wan was bought by the Philippines’ Jollibee Group in January 2025, and 2026 has been the chain’s first full year under new ownership — the kind of transition that often loosens standards at a landmark food brand. It hasn’t, at least not at the original Sham Shui Po shop, which Jollibee has kept running on the same chef-training and sourcing systems that built the name.

A Cantonese restaurant tucked above Wellington Street in Central has just taken back the title of Asia’s best restaurant. The Chairman, led by chef Danny Yip, was named No. 1 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026 at a ceremony held March 25 at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel — its second time topping the list after first winning in 2021.

A three-Michelin-star restaurant tucked into a converted West Loop rowhouse just topped the most-watched ranking in American fine dining. Smyth, run by chefs John Shields and Karen Urie Shields, was named the Best Restaurant in North America for 2026 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants — the first Chicago restaurant ever to hold that title.

Taiwan’s “500碗” (500 Bowls) food guide handed out its 2026 awards on June 26 — its fourth year running, and its biggest yet, covering 472 individual snacks and dishes nationwide. Two shops tied for the top “three bowls” honor, and one of them has been serving the same stretch of sidewalk for half a century.