Last April 28th and during the annual gala organized by Restaurant Magazine, it was published the list of the World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards 2014. As an alternative to the rankings of the Michelin guide, this list, compiled by the votes of nearly a thousand expert catering industry worldwide, is considered the "Oscars" of haute cuisine.
In the 2014 edition, the Danish restaurant “Noma” regained the world title, which had lost the previous year in favor of “El Celler de Can Roca”, which becomes the second position. Behind these “Ostertia Francescana” consolidates the third, place finish last year, and the north american “Eleven Madison Park” continues climbing positions, up to the fourth place.
A look in time will help us to better understand dynamics, cycles and trends as specific as international haute gastronomy sector.
For analysis purposes, we built set of data with the rankings the past ten years (2005-2014) published by Restaurant Magazine. Some conclusions that can be drawn from the exploration of the input, output, and evolution of the highest rated restaurants in this last decade are:
1. During the last decade there has been a clear relief in the top 10 of the industry. None of the Top10 of 2005 remained in the top 10 in 2014. Moreover, only 3 of them were appearing in the list of the 50 best 10 years later.
2. Difficulty to maintain the position for many years (more than five years), or it progresses or it goes into decline. “Arzak” and “Mugaritz” only seem to keep the score, at least the last eight years. Interestingly there are two restaurants in the same city: San Sebastián.
3. Emerging economies gain weight. As in other areas, the emerging economies of Asia (China / Hong Kong, Singapore, ...) or Latin America (Brazil, Peru, ...) have gained prominence in the list. If in 2005 only Hong Kong restaurant “Felix” appear ed in the list of the top 50, and in 2014 there were 12 establishments in these two continents. Naturally, this results in a lower weight of countries that traditionally permeating the list, especially France and UK.
How we made it?
The challenge of this visualization was to represent intuitively and comprehensible 10 lists of 50 names and possible series included in them. The dataset consists of two tables 124 x 12 (124 rows, one for restaurant and 12 columns: restaurant, country, plus a year - from 2005 to 2014), with lists of names and their position in the ranking. The visualization is composed by two layers: 1) Draw Text, to represent the ten restaurant listings; and 2) the Line Chart, to plot the series of featured restaurants.
With positions of each restaurant on each of the lists and the year we created the coordinates of the rankings table to be read by Draw Text module. In addition to the list of names and other information such as country and location we add the labels and tooltips for each item. We compute and filter in parallel the list of restaurants under different queries: Top10 in a given year, those who have risen the most recent year, Top3 in the entire period or country restaurant. With the results of each query and using ListSelectors, we select restaurants to be highlighted in the line chart. To differentiate the lines of each country, we generated a list of 28 colors (one per country) and assigned each one to one country.
Finally, we overlapped and synchronized both visualizers before publishing the project.
