Prick With A Fork

So the annual list of the world’s so-called “Top 100” restaurants has been released, and naturally the press is buzzing with analysis of who’s up and who’s down and why. No surprise, modernist gastronomy continues to reign supreme with the likes of Noma, Alinea, and Osteria Francescana taking top spots on the list, and restaurants in Iberia and Iberia’s former colonies continue to be well represented as successor states to the old El Bulli.

There’s a certain point at which these sort of exercises become silly: Can anyone say that you’ll have a measurably worse meal at Restaurant Daniel (#25) in New York than you will at Le Chateaubriand (#15) in Paris? Nevertheless, I was pleased to see my beloved Eleven Madison Park come in at #10, and was disappointed that the top Australian eatery (Quay) only came in at #29, though for a country our size we’re doing reasonably well. What Marque (#61) is doing on the list at all is anyone’s guess.

Full list after the jump:

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• Boy On A Bike is having dessert trouble …
• Parents are teaming up with lawyers to avoid responsibility for fun and profit … 
• And as much as I love Austin, Texas, and as much as I love barbeque, I sure as hell ain’t camping out to get a feed. I won’t even queue for Porteno.

Turns out, if we hadn’t been avid consumers of the stuff early on in history, we might not be here today:

If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday.

When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child’s brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. That provided a distinct competitive advantage for early humans when limited resources and a small population made it difficult for them to thrive. “Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,” said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. “This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.”

So take that, all you meat-free moralists! (h/t Instapundit).