Noma

It's genuinely hard to picture the last twenty years of food without it. When Chef René Redzepi opened Noma in a Copenhagen warehouse in 2003, he set out to prove that Nordic ingredients — not foie gras, not caviar — could carry cooking of the very highest order, and the cook-by-the-season idea that the entire restaurant world now takes for granted spread out from this room. He threw out the white tablecloths and the stiff service, too, and had the cooks themselves carry plates to the table. Five turns at No.1 on the World's 50 Best across two incarnations, three Michelin stars. If you only ever build one trip around a restaurant, it's a defensible choice.