Tripadvisor names a 12-seat Buenos Aires grill its best

The Tripadvisor Best of the Best awards named Fogón Asado, a twelve-seat counter in Buenos Aires built around a 360-degree open-fire grill, the top fine-dining restaurant in the world.

The Palermo restaurant serves a single tasting menu of wet- and dry-aged Argentine beef cooked over wood fire, with reservations required and everything served in one shift. It beat out fine-dining winners from dozens of countries to take the worldwide top spot.

Unlike the World's 50 Best or Michelin, Tripadvisor's award isn't decided by a panel. Winners are ranked by the volume and quality of user reviews collected between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, filtered through editorial checks, placing them in the top 1% of the platform's restaurant listings.

Food is at the heart of how we experience a destination, and these awards recognize the restaurant and culinary experiences travelers consider among the very best.

A crowd-sourced list next to the critics' circuit

The category winners spread the recognition wide: Pizzeria Arrivederci in Paris topped casual dining worldwide, Dishoom in London was named "Viral Right Now," and new experiential categories crowned a Reykjavik food walk, a Rome pasta and tiramisu class, and a Cape Town wine tour. "Food is at the heart of how we experience a destination, and these awards recognize the restaurant and culinary experiences travelers consider among the very best," said Laurel Greatrix, Tripadvisor's chief communications officer.

The method puts Tripadvisor's list at odds with the invited-critic circuit that sends the World's 50 Best to Lima this November or the 50 Best Bars to Milan: a restaurant lands here by winning over thousands of paying diners one visit at a time, not a panel of critics and chefs.

What a review-driven ranking rewards

A twelve-seat asado counter beating out grand dining rooms on review volume says as much about the ranking as about the restaurant: Fogón Asado's format, one seating, one menu, total attention on twelve guests, is built to generate the kind of consistent, superlative reviews that a points-based system favours. It doesn't make the beef any less real, but it does mean the list measures a different thing than a critics' guide: reliability of delight, repeated at scale, rather than a single expert's judgment of technique.