World's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 heads to Lima
Maido joins the Best of the Best group as Peru's capital hosts the awards on 4 November, alongside Central among the ranking's retired champions.
The World's 50 Best Restaurants will hand out its 2026 awards in Lima on 4 November, moving the ceremony to Peru after organisers dropped an earlier plan to hold it in Abu Dhabi.
The switch puts the ceremony in the city that produced the reigning World's Best Restaurant: Maido, where chef Mitsuharu Tsumura took the top spot at the 2025 awards in Turin. PromPérú, Peru's state tourism and trade body, is hosting the event in partnership with the list's organisers.
Lima carries weight on the ranking beyond Maido alone. Kjolle, Mérito and Mayta all sit inside the current top tier, part of a cluster that has made the Peruvian capital one of the list's most consistent sources of top-20 finishes over the past decade.
Best of the Best is where a winner goes to stop competing and start being cited.
Maido joins the retired champions
At the 2026 ceremony, Maido moves into the Best of the Best category, reserved for restaurants that have previously topped the ranking and can no longer compete for the number one spot. That makes Lima the only city with two restaurants in the group: Central, run by chef Virgilio Martínez, held the top spot in 2023.
The schedule runs over two days. The #50BestTalks conference, a series of panels for chefs and hospitality figures, takes place on 3 November. The following day brings the ranking itself, positions one to 50, plus the Best Female Chef and Icon awards. Restaurants 51 to 100, along with the Champions of Change, Art of Hospitality and One To Watch awards, are announced in the weeks before the main event.
A city still producing new tables
The choice also arrives as Lima's dining scene keeps generating new openings around its established names. Marco Palma, formerly of Maido's kitchen, opened his own restaurant, Ototo, in the city in April: an eight-seat counter built around Peruvian ingredients worked through Japanese technique, the same fusion that built Maido's reputation.
Whether the ceremony itself changes anything for Lima's restaurants is a separate question. A host city gets a week of attention and a spike in bookings. It gets no guarantee that the list's voters, spread across more than 25 regions, will keep sending Peruvian kitchens up the rankings once the cameras leave.
