Asador Etxebarri, a grill restaurant in Spain’s Basque Country, has been named the world’s best restaurant for 2026 at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards.
The ranking was announced at a ceremony in Lima, Peru. The restaurant sits in the village of Axpe, in the municipality of Atxondo, and is known for a distinctive method of cooking meat and seafood over charcoal and wood embers.
Chef-owner Bittor Arguinzoniz — whose name also appears in Spanish as Víctor — said the award was a genuine honour, and credited the influence of the mothers and grandmothers whose cooking shaped his approach.
Asador Etxebarri climbed from second place in the 2025 list to take the top spot. It succeeds Maido of Lima, which moves into the awards’ “Best of the Best” hall of fame and is therefore no longer eligible for the ranking.
Arguinzoniz built the restaurant’s reputation over several decades, developing custom grills and adapting embers from different woods to individual ingredients — a technique applied to everything from prawns to butter and milk. Guests are served a tasting menu running to around 14 courses.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, compiled from the votes of an international panel of chefs, writers and critics, is among the most closely watched rankings in the restaurant industry, and a top placing reliably reshapes a venue’s booking demand for the year ahead.
Hiru News, which reported the result, credited CNN.