World's 50 Best Restaurants Relocates to Lima After Late Switch From Abu Dhabi
The World's 50 Best Restaurants will hold its 2026 ceremony in Lima on November 4, a late change from the planned Abu Dhabi venue and the event's first return to Peru in twenty-four years.
On the fourth of November 2026, in Lima, The World's 50 Best Restaurants will hand out its awards for the first time in twenty-four years on Peruvian soil, the ceremony rerouted from Abu Dhabi in a late change that left organizers reworking logistics built for another hemisphere entirely. Lima gets the room back.
Three prizes will be settled before the main list is read: the Champions of Change award, the Art of Hospitality award, and One To Watch, each announced ahead of the ranking itself, the way a loom is threaded before the pattern shows, warp strung before weft, structure fixed before image appears. None of the three carries a number. All three carry weight.
The relocation itself behaves like a dropped thread picked up mid-pattern: Abu Dhabi had been set as the frame, contracts and flights arranged around it months in advance, and then Lima was pulled back into the weave with weeks rather than years to prepare, the city's kitchens absorbing a schedule built for a different capital on a different continent. Twenty-four years is long enough that an entire generation of cooks in this city has never worked a service under that particular light, has only heard the old ceremony described the way older cooks describe a harvest they missed.
What returns to Lima on the fourth of November is not a trophy circuit passing through on its way to the next capital, but a night that belongs, for once, to the cooks who serve this city on every other night of the year, the ones still standing at their own stoves once the visiting tables have gone quiet and the ranking has been filed away, the ceremony closing on Lima long after Lima closes on them. The city keeps the night.
