Bringing The World's 50 Best Restaurants to Canada

In 2017, Canada’s Best New Restaurants published an open letter to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. It was a rallying cry, asking the highly respected organization to discover for itself the quality and diversity of the Canadian food scene. “You’re missing out,” we said then. And we meant it: There’s nothing quite like Canadian cuisine. Just look at this year’s Top 10, with a Whitehorse oyster house, and a lab for waste reduction and upcycled ingredients in St. Catharines. The letter found its target audience. World’s 50 Best selected Canada – and Ontario in particular – as the next destination for its 50 Best Explores program (since launching in 2016, the program has visited destinations including Peru and Thailand). They chose Ontario for its exciting food scene and wealth of farm–to–table operations, and in August, three chefs – Junghyun “JP” Park, chef–owner of New York’s Atomix, and Ignacio Mattos and Sam Lawrence, chef–owner and chef de cuisine, respectively, of Estela, also in New York – arrived to discover the best of Ontario cuisine. You can see the whole story on the World’s 50 Best YouTube channel; for now we’re glad everyone else is about to discover what we already know, and to World’s 50 Best: thanks for reading.

November 6, 2019
Junghyun “JP” Park and Jason Bangerter inspecting ingredients in the wild
Junghyun “JP” Park and Jason Bangerter – executive chef at Cambridge, Ontario’s Langdon Hall – enjoy the freshest flavours.
A beekeeper inspecting the honey
Seeing how the honey is made at Ontario Honey Creations.
A wooden basket of brown, blue and white eggs
Putting a lot of eggs in one basket at Murray’s Farm.
A white plate with fried potatoes and other vegetables on it sits on a rustic table.
A spread of breads and cheeses with a vase of flowers. A hand reaches in picking up a piece of bread; the scene is outside and there is sun-dappled grass in the background.
Chef Junghyun 'JP' Park looks out at a rushing river, with trees on the shore in the background.
Three men stand at a table in the woods sharing food.
A man's hands and legs are seen as he grills pieces of fish on an outdoor grill.
Two men watch a woman talking as they look at a bunch of large open cartons filled with white eggs. All of them are wearing hairnets.