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This Restaurant in Lima, Peru, Was Just Named the Best in the World

This Restaurant in Lima, Peru, Was Just Named the Best in the World

The 2025 edition of The World's 50 Best Restaurants unfolded in Turin, Italy, on June 19.
Maido, the Lima institution where Peruvian and Japanese traditions meet, claimed this year's top spot. Asador Etxebarri in Spain, which is all about fire and fermentation, held steady at No. 2. Mexico City's Quintonil landed at No. 3, further proof that Latin America now sits confidently at the center of the global culinary map.
North America, by contrast, made a quieter statement, but not an insignificant one. Atomix in New York City, the intimate tasting counter helmed by chef Junghyun 'JP' Park and his wife, partner and hospitality director Ellia Park, slipped from No. 8 to No. 12. SingleThread, the elegant farm-restaurant-inn in Healdsburg, California, led by husband-wife duo Kyle and Katina Connaughton, dropped from the main list to No. 80 in the extended 51-100 ranking.
I spoke with JP and Ellia Park earlier this week at the James Beard Awards in Chicago, where they had just won for Outstanding Hospitality. 'We're not just plating food,' JP told me before flying to Italy. 'We're trying to offer a place where guests can truly feel present, maybe even feel seen.' Atomix's rise from No. 33 in 2023 to the top 10 last year marked a turning point for Korean fine dining in America. But its real triumph lies in how it frames hospitality as a cultural act—one where the tasting menu becomes a vessel for storytelling, tradition, and connection.
Out west in Sonoma County, I visited SingleThread's 70-acre farm in Dry Creek Valley, where Kyle, the chef, and Katina, the head farmer, are building something far larger than a restaurant. 'We're part of an ecosystem,' Katina said as we walked between rows of young greens and flowering herbs. 'Our goal is regeneration, not just of the soil, but of the way we think about food.' Their inn, perched above the dining room, serves the most quietly extraordinary breakfast I've ever had: house-milled grains, just-laid eggs, persimmons still warm from the tree. While SingleThread is no longer in the top 50, its impact has only deepened, shifting the focus from accolades to ethos.
William Drew, managing director of the 50 Best portfolio, echoed that sentiment. 'It's not just about which countries are ranking,' he told me. 'It's about what values are showing up on the plate—sustainability, indigenous ingredients, and a deep respect for culinary heritage.' The interior of Quintonil in Mexico City.
With more than 1,100 anonymous voters around the globe, the list is always evolving. This year, that evolution is also geographic.
For the first time, North America will receive its own dedicated ranking. North America's 50 Best Restaurants will debut this September in Las Vegas. The list, compiled by a new academy of 300 regional experts from the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean, will reframe the continent's culinary narrative, spotlighting restaurants well beyond the coastal strongholds of New York and San Francisco. The live countdown will take place inside the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas on September 25. The Ganjang Gejang from Atomix in NYC.
The launch coincides with Revelry, Wynn Las Vegas's immersive food and drink festival, which has evolved into a global culinary summit. The programming reads like a love letter to craftsmanship: tastings, talks, hands-on workshops, and a constellation of collaborative dinners. Atomix will team up with Casa Playa, where chef Sarah Thompson was a 2025 James Beard finalist, for a dinner that traces flavors through Korea and Mexico's Yucatán. SingleThread will unite with chef Jeff Ramsey at Mizumi for an afternoon exploring Japanese gastronomy through a Northern California lens. 'It's not just about a dinner,' JP Park said. 'It's about learning from one another, creating something ephemeral and meaningful.'
Beyond the headline dinners, the week will include: The Feast, a multi-cuisine tasting experience, anchored by chefs from coastal Greece to Texas's 6666 Ranch; and the All-Star Chefs Dinner, hosted by Christopher Lee and featuring names like Spoon & Stable's Gavin Kaysen and Le B.'s Angie Mar. For those hungry for more, the Connoisseur Series offers everything from a whiskey tasting with Mahesh Patel to a burger-and-bubbles masterclass with Dominique Crenn.
While Maido and Quintonil may currently dominate the top slots in The World's 50 Best Restaurants, it's clear North America is moving in its own direction—one marked less by dominance than by depth.
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The View From Mount Olympus: What The Greek Gods Ate And Drank While Partying
The View From Mount Olympus: What The Greek Gods Ate And Drank While Partying

Forbes

time10 hours ago

  • Forbes

The View From Mount Olympus: What The Greek Gods Ate And Drank While Partying

|Medium: Fresco|Creation date: 1518-1519|Located in: Palazzo Farnese, Farnesina, Italy, circa 1518. ... More (Photo by David Lees/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)Rare is the Greek god or goddess who is not a cosmic annoyance to human beings. They are immeasurably flawed, vindictive, irrational, self-serving, mean-spirited and use their powers to outwit each other and mankind. They were also gluttons: According to Homer, the gods lounging atop Mount Olympus 'feasted all day until sunset and ate to their hearts content,' then they would put up their feet and listen to music and poetry. Bacchanalia, before 1659. Found in the Collection of Art History Museum, Vienne. (Photo by Fine Art ... More Images/) Dionysus was a god the Greeks most happily imitated. Called Bacchus by the Romans, he was the privileged son of Zeus himself and god of agriculture, who showed men how to grow wine grapes and make wine; he was also a comic sower of decadence, though he was never depicted as obese by Greek sculptors. He would conduct his conquests surrounded by a retinue of Bacchii that included drunken satyrs and mad women known as maenads who wore crowns of snakes and would tear animals and enemies to pieces. The feasts celebrating Dionysus date to Attica, where a yearly wine festival was held during the winter solstice and grew into raucous, sexually charged, raunchy scenes in which masked men dressed in goat skins, giant phalluses were carried about and flaunted and dances tended towards the obscene. ITALY - CIRCA 2002: Symposium scene, ca 480-490 BC, decorative fresco from the north wall of the ... More Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, Campania, Italy. Detail of the so-called lovers. Ancient Greek civilization, Magna Graecia, 5th Century BC. Paestum, Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Archaeological Museum) (Photo) Drinking parties held in Dionysus's honor, called sympósions, became very deliberate gluttonous events, despite Dionysus's own dictum that a man should drink only three cups of wine at dinner: toasting the first to health, the second to love and pleasure and the third to sleep, after which a guest should go home to bed. Few paid much attention once the party got Red-Figure Psykter, about 510 BC. Wine Cooler with Athletes. Additional Info: The psykter is a ... More vessel used for cooling wine at a symposium. Placed in a large bowl of ice-cold water, the bulbous upper section - decorated here with youths in the gymnasium - would be visible to drinkers. Creator: Smikros. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images) Such banquets were all male, with the exception of naked dancing girls, and the manners and rituals of inviting guests, making the menus and deciding on the entertainment were very involved. During a sympósion guests arrived, their feet would be washed by slaves, then they reclined on couches; a communal cup called a psycter of aromatics was passed around, and the eating part of the banquet began. But the serious drinking came after dinner. The meal would consist of an enormous number of dishes. A poem written around 400 BC called The Banquet describes a feast well appreciated by its enthusiastic author. In came a pair of slaves with a shiny table, and another, and another until they filled the room. They fetched in show-white barley-rolls baskets, A casserole— no bigger than that—call it a marmite, full of a noble eel with a look of the conger about him. Honey-glazed shrimps besides, my love, Squid sprinkled with sea-salt, Baby birds in flaky pastry, And a baked tuna, gods! What a huge one fresh from the fire and the pan and the carving knife. Enough steaks from its tender belly to delight us both as long as we might care to stay and munch. . . . . Then the same polished tables, loaded with more good things, sailed back to us, 'second table,' as men say Sweet pastry shells, crispy flapjacks, toasted sesame cakes drenched in honey sauce, Cheesecake, made with milk and honey, baked like a pie; Cheese-and-sesame sweetmeats fried in the hottest oil in sesame seeds were passed around. At that point, with only small bites called tragemata to nibble on, the guests began to drink as much as they liked of wine cut two-thirds by water. If a man protested that he'd had enough wine and refused another cup, he had to perform some silly entertainment, like dancing naked or carrying the girl flute-player around the room. Parasites was the name given to those who arrived late to the party and mooched off the remains. Only around 500 BC were women invited to join the fun, but they were largely courtesans, prostitutes and female artists. Epicurus (ca.341-270 BC). Ancient Greek philosopher. Bust. Marble. From Villa Casali, Rome (1-160 ... More AD). British Museum. London, England, Great Britain. (Photo by: Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) How such a gentle philosopher named Epicurus became equated with the term 'epicureanism' as a license to excessive indulgence, particularly in food and drink, is a unfortunate because he actually advocated 'katastematic pleasure' that is experienced through a harmonious state of mind free of mental distress and pain achieved through a simple life rather than by activating unnatural pleasures like gluttony that take hold of the mind's free will. Ulysses and Circe, ca 1580-1585. Found in the collection of Art History Museum, Vienne. Artist : ... More Spranger, Bartholomeus (1546-1611). (Photo by Fine Art Images/) In Homer's Odyssey, the poet insists that while heroes need proper nourishment, mostly meat and bread, it would be foolhardy for them to indulge in gluttonous behavior. Nevertheless, in The Iliad the hero Odysseus is called by an opponent 'wild for fame, glutton for cunning, glutton for war,' while Odysseus uses the word 'glutton' to describe King Agamemnon as a 'dog-faced' glutton' and 'people-devouring king.' When Odysseus sails into the clutches of the breathtakingly beautiful goddess Circe, she turns his men into swine with a drugged drink (she turns them back, too) and persuades him to feast with her and her maidens on 'enough food and drink to last forever.' And then to bed. Odysseus and his men gave in to her seductions and stuck around the island 'day after day, eating food in plenty, and drinking sweet wine' for an entire Marotti, from Rome, 2nd century. Statuette of naked Herakles in Boston-Oxford type, with ... More club, and lionskin. Copy of work of c460 BC. Dimensions: height: 57 cm. (Photo by Ashmolean Museum/) But the candidate for Super Glutton is the god Herakles (Hercules to the Romans), a bastard son of Zeus whose wife Hera tried to abort him and afterwards tried to make his life miserable. Herakles is, of course, a person of inhuman strength, but he emerges as a comic figure among Greeks who regarded his gluttonous antics as human foibles. From the earliest days of Greek drama Herakles is ridiculed for his brutish way of eating his food, his preference for a good meal versus a good woman and, in Aristophanes's The Bird, even his reluctance to leave a barbecue in order to help save his own father. In an earlier play, The Frogs, Aristophanes had also portrayed Herakles as a god led around by his nose at the thought of food, describing how in a trip to the underworld he had gobbled up sixteen loaves of bread, 20 portions of beef stew, a mess of fish and a newly made goat's cheese—baskets included—then, bellowing and drawing his sword, skipped out on the bill. Though sometimes depicted in terracotta figurines from the 5th and 4th centuries BC as pot-bellied, overwhelmingly Herakles was sculpted in marble and bronze by both Greek and Romans as a male figure of daunting musculature with what today are called 'killer abs.' Alexander the Great on his Sickbed, 1806. Creator: CW Eckersberg. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage ... More Images via Getty Images) Alexander the Great was a mere mortal and a big drinker who on 'on such a day, and sometimes two days together, slept after a debauch.' ALexander's soldiers, named Promachus. won the prize after knocking down four gallons of wine (unmixed with water). But not everyone, especially the local people, was used to drinking so much wine, resulting in 41 deaths from alcohol poisoning. Never defeated in battle, Alexander's demise came at the age of thirty in 323 BC, in Babylon. The earliest reports say that after nights of excessive drinking, the young king fell ill with fever and died two weeks later. Others contend he was poisoned by his viceroy Antipater, while more modern conjectures propose the weary conqueror had picked up typhoid fever or meningitis or was done in by his over-use of the medicine hellebore, then prescribed as a purgative as well as for gout and signs of insanity.

Fans Think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Are Engaged Thanks to Zooming in on a Very Specific Photo
Fans Think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Are Engaged Thanks to Zooming in on a Very Specific Photo

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Fans Think Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Are Engaged Thanks to Zooming in on a Very Specific Photo

Kay, so you know how you were minding your business yesterday afternoon and then your phone exploded thanks to Travis Kelce casually posting never-before-seen photos of his and Taylor Swift's romantic summer? Honestly there's a lot to unpack here, but fans were quick to notice that both Travis and Taylor accidentally revealed their phone lock screens. Here's Taylor's, which sleuthing tells us is potentially a photo from their trip to Italy (Trav was wearing the same checkered sweater in pap pics taken of them on a boat): And here's Travis', a much easier-to-see pic of him and Taylor—featuring Taylor holding up her hands. And naturally fans are convinced that she's showing off an engagement ring: I mean, listen. Is it possible? Yes. But there's also speculation that Taylor could be wearing Travis' super bowl rings in the photo, which would also make (probably more) sense. Either way Travis and Taylor have been dealing with engagement rumors pretty much since they got together. Back in May, a source told The Daily Mail, "Everyone is just waiting for Travis to ask her parents for her hand in marriage, her parents will say yes, and they can't wait for them to get engaged. Nothing seems to be imminent, but it will 100 percent happen. Taylor and Travis are treating this relationship as their last relationship, and when they get engaged, when they get married and when they start a family, it will be exactly when it is meant to happen." You Might Also Like Here's What NOT to Wear to a Wedding Meet the Laziest, Easiest Acne Routine You'll Ever Try Solve the daily Crossword

Trailer For AZTEC BATMAN: CLASH OF EMPIRES Dives into Mythology, Culture, and Justice — GeekTyrant
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San Diego Comic-Con brought plenty of surprises this year, but one reveal in particular stood out, a very cool and interesting reimagining of the Dark Knight like we've never seen before. HBO Max has dropped the trailer for its upcoming animated feature Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires , and it's an absolute game-changer for DC fans. This Batman story comes with a cultural twist and it's a full-on reinvention that digs deep into Aztec mythology and history while keeping the core of what makes Batman, well, Batman. The film's official synopsis from HBO Max Latin America lays out the premise: 'A young Aztec boy named Yohualli Coatl, whose father, village leader Toltecatzin, is murdered by Spanish Conquistadors. Coatl flees to Tenochtitlan to warn King Moctezuma and his high priest, Yoka, of looming danger. Using the temple of Tzinacan, the bat god, as a lair, Yohualli trains with his mentor and assistant, Acatzin, developing equipment and weaponry to confront the Spaniard invasion, protect Moctezuma's temple, and avenge his father's death.' Batman as a warrior of the Aztec empire, fighting Spanish Conquistadors while drawing power and inspiration from the bat god Tzinacan, that's so cool! It's an awesome and visually rich setting that gives the Dark Knight an entirely new mythology to explore. This project was originally announced in 2022 to celebrate Batman's 83rd anniversary, Aztec Batman is a collaboration between Warner Bros. Animation, Particular Crowd, Mexico's Ánima, and Chatrone, the company behind The Book of Life . The movie was directed by Juan Meza-León, best known for his work on the Harley Quinn Animated Series , who serves as both co-writer and director. Meza-León and his team have taken inspiration from multiple sources, blending historical authenticity with the iconic traits that make Batman so badass. One of the most intriguing aspects of this film is how it balances Batman's familiar origin themes such as tragedy, vengeance, justice with the sociopolitical and spiritual context of the Aztec empire. Speaking to Anime News Network, Meza-León explained: 'He goes through tragedy at the hands of the conquistadors. So that's where you get the loss of the parents and also the loss of his village. That motivates him and pushes him into a journey that, unbeknownst to him, is being led by the deities that guide him into becoming the bat warrior.' He also assured fans that while the characters will be reimagined, their essence will remain intact: 'We try to be as faithful as we can to the essence of the characters, whether it's Batman, Joker, or Two-Face. They're completely new characters with different origins, but you can still see the spirit of their comic counterparts.' This means we'll likely see Aztec-inspired versions of Batman's greatest foes, each reinterpreted through the lens of ancient Mesoamerican culture. The team behind the film took care to represent Aztec architecture, weapons, and societal structures, all while weaving in mythological elements. Producer Aztec Batman is steeped in historical and cultural authenticity. The team took care to represent Aztec architecture, weapons, and societal structures, all while weaving in mythological elements. Producer García de Letona shared that the movie was inspired by classic Batman works as well: 'The movie was inspired by Batman: The Animated Series, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, and a bunch of comic books.' This isn't the first time Batman has been reimagined in a different cultural context, 2018's Batman Ninja threw the Caped Crusader into a wild anime-inspired setting, and its upcoming sequel Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League will do the same. But Aztec Batman is different. It's not just using aesthetics, it's anchoring the story in real history and mythology, blending the legendary hero with a powerful cultural narrative about colonialism, resistance, and identity. And honestly? That makes it one of the most exciting Batman projects in years. Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires will hit digital platforms on September 19.

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