Go Restaurants:Where would you eat if money was no object? Kilian Doyleserves up a list of top restaurants worth a visit

IF YOU suddenly found yourself with access to unlimited funds, what would you do? Buy shoes? Fast cars? Property? Me? I’d eat it. Not literally, obviously, unless the Lotto has started paying out in chocolate coins. What I’d do is embark on a gastrotour of as many of the world’s greatest restaurants as possible before my liver turned into foie gras.

Such a decadent, orgiastic frenzy of eating seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable ambition. Which is why I’ve compiled a list of the 10 restaurants in Europe I’d visit first if a pot of loot ever were to land in my lap. The wonderful el Bulli in Catalonia isn’t included because, while I’d go back in a flash, its lottery system of allocating reservations means all the money in the world couldn’t buy you a spot.

As I’ve deliberately picked restaurants I have yet to visit, I am basing my choices on trusted reviewers, bloggers and word of mouth. These restaurants may not be the best in Europe, or even in their own countries, but they are the ones that pique my interest most. Some are fashionable, some are traditional, some are virtually unknown and some are quite possibly a bit rubbish. But you’ll never know unless you go.

Noma

Copenhagen

This is a predictable choice, having knocked long-time undisputed champion el Bulli off the top of the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list last year.

Chef René Redzepi has eschewed such gastronomic staples as olive oil, heavy cream-based dishes and high-end ingredients. Instead, his emphasis is on terroir – the philosophy of using highly seasonal, fiercely regional and sustainable ingredients, often gathered by teams of foragers. Anything edible is liable to appear on his menus, from wild herbs and berries to reindeer to lichens.

Such an approach couldn’t work in a big city like London or Paris, but with ready access to the sparsely populated Scandinavian countryside, Redzepi has managed to pull it off. And how.

His precise, elegant, pared-down food appears deceptively simple. But while it may seem the antithesis of the molecular cuisine of el Bulli’s genius in residence Ferran Adrià, with its scientific equipment and processes, he freely admits employing many of the techniques he learned while serving an el Bulli apprenticeship prior to opening Noma in a former warehouse in the regenerated Christianshavn district in 2003.

• Sample dishes: toast with cod roe, wild herbs and vinegar powder; tartar and wood sorrel, aromatic juniper and tarragon.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – DKK 1,095 kr (€150); wine selection – DKK 895 kr (€120); juice selection – DKK 395 kr (€50).
• noma.dk

The Sportsman

England

Top class dining is often a stuffy business. All those over-attentive dickie-bowed waiters pouring your water and pushing your chair under your backside after you’ve been off stealing hand towels in the toilets can get a bit much.

Stephen Harris, the self-taught chef at The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent, is of the same view, hence his ambition to strip it of the superfluous aspects, making it less poncey and more accessible.

At his Michelin-starred pub in the middle of nowhere, you sit at rough wooden tables, order pints at the bar and read the menu off a big blackboard. The Dorchester it ain’t. Yet the unfussy cooking, with its clean, intense flavours, is being raved about.

So driven – some might say obsessed – is Harris that when he needs salt, he boils buckets of seawater. He sources his ingredients from farms and suppliers within a stone’s throw of his pub. The Sportsman also cures its own ham, churns its own butter and grows its own vegetables.

Of course, such dedication is pointless if one forgets one very important thing – the food has to be brilliant. A colleague who has been twice and still swoons at the thought assures me it is.

• Sample dishes: turbot with chestnuts, bacon and parsley sauce; baked oyster with gooseberry granite.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – £55 (€65)
• thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk

Mugaritz

Spain

Spanish chefs, spearheaded by Adrià, revolutionised cooking in the past 20 years. The French barely got a look in as their Iberian cousins read the haute cuisine rulebooks, adapted them to their regional styles and ripped them up. Now that Adrià has decided to shut el Bulli this year, others will have to carry the flame.

Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz in a Basque village outside San Sebastian is one of several with the necessary chops.

Like Redzepi, Aduriz is a former el Bulli apprentice fond of exploring obscure ingredients, such as winter purslane, roasted acorn skins or amaranth grains, and strives for daring marriages of flavour. His food is described as earthy yet subtle and, above all, avant-garde.

• Sample dishes: toasted wheat, spider crab coral and shoots of rock samphire; roasted Bonito from the Bay of Biscay over sea chamomile and coastal herbs.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – €135.
• mugaritz.com

Pierre Gagnaire

Paris

Despite Spain stealing its thunder, any list like this has to pay its respects to France by including some full-blown haute cuisine in a grand Parisian dining room.

But which one? Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée? L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon? Guy Savoy?

All have three Michelin stars. But to retain these dizzying heights – and justify their equally dizzying prices – one has to be consistent and, dare I say it, safe.

Gagnaire is, by reputation, neither consistent nor safe. Yet he retains his three stars and the adulation of fans through the sheer force of his cooking, which can, according to those fortunate enough to have eaten at his restaurant on Rue Balzac when he’s been in the kitchen, be transcendental.

• Sample dishes: Peking duck with dates, blackberries and bitter chocolate sauce; mousseline of langoustine with soy bean sprouts and baby mustard leaves.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – €265.
• pierre-gagnaire.com

Bras

France

In the same country but in a different universe to the big statement restaurants of Paris, Michel Bras is based in Lagouile in the hills of the Aveyron region north of the Côte D’Azur.

Heavily influenced by Japanese culture, he adopts a zen-like approach to food, serving delicate, pastoral dishes in a space-age glass-walled dining room overhanging the glorious countryside.

His creations are pastoral, colourful and eye-popping, like a Monet on a plate. His signature dish is Le Gargouillou – a medley of up to 60 individually blanched vegetables, flowers and seeds that vary depending on the day, with an aroma that fills the whole room.

• Sample dishes: white asparagus encrusted in black truffle with green peas; lamb and grilled buckwheat with mustard seed, coconut milk and coriander.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – €185.
• michel-bras.com

Faviken Magasinet

Sweden

I confess to knowing nothing about this place beyond what’s on its website, which portrays it as something of a hard-core version of Noma. Rather than just using ingredients from the wilderness, it is actually in the wilderness.

Situated in a farm in rolling meadows around Järpen on the shore of Lake Kalljön in central Sweden, it seats just 12 diners and serves rektún food, which is roughly translated as real food with a strong organic, terroiriste philosophy in harmony with its surroundings. What’s more, after lunch you can go food foraging with the chef, hiking in the forests or skiing in the mountains, before retiring to your log cabin for a sauna and well-earned snooze.

• Sample dishes: salted wild trout in a crust of warm pig's blood; black grouse gently cooked in a pot of meadow herbs.
• Sample prices: set dinner – SEK 995kr (€110); drinks selection – SEK 995 kr (€110).
• favikenmagasinet.se

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

London

Blumenthal, an avid food historian as well as madcap inventor, has been burrowing away in the bowels of the British Library to research what medieval Britons were eating and promises “history-inspired modern dishes” when Dinner opens at the end of this month.

Having eaten in his two other restaurants – the Fat Duck and the nearby Hind’s Head gastropub – and enjoyed both thoroughly, for wildly different reasons, I imagine it’ll be interesting, if nothing else.

If he creates a happy medium between the two, I’ll be in Heston heaven.

• Sample dishes: hay-smoked mackerel, lemon salad and gentleman's relish; roast scallops, cucumber ketchup and bergamot.
• Sample prices: not yet available.
• dinnerbyheston.com

The Kitchin

Edinburgh

The Kitchin “serves modern British cuisine influenced by French cooking techniques and an appreciation of the best quality ingredients available from Scotland’s natural larder”. That’s the blurb, anyway.

Of course, this is nothing new. But what really sets it apart from the herd is that it offers the chance to eat grouse cooked by Tom Kitchin, a man who learned his trade in some of Europe’s greatest kitchens and is now so entwined with his trusted suppliers he probably knew the bird personally.

He proudly displays his own game-keeper on his website.

Need I say more?

• Sample dishes: carpaccio of west coast octopus with pickled vegetables, squat lobster and lemon dressing; woodcock from the Borders with pumpkin, celeriac and a sauce called salmis.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – £65 (€80); wine selection – £45 (€55).
• thekitchin.com

Dal Pescatore

Italy

Traditional Italian food is among the best in the world, if it’s done properly. Dal Pescatore, nestled in a nature reserve at Canneto Sull’Oglio east of Milan, is renowned for doing just that.

Chef Nadia Santini has tweaked recipes handed down by family matriarchs from generation to generation to produce some of the most sublime cuisine in Italy.

It even has a helipad for international guests.

I can imagine few things more blissful than sitting on the vine-draped veranda, gorging on white truffle fettucine under a setting Mantuan sun.

• Sample dishes: calve's liver with artichoke and rosemary butter; risotto with peas, porcini and sweet herbs.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – €170.
• dalpescatore.com

In de Wulf

Belgium

Know that joke about naming three famous Belgians? You can now add Kobe Desramaults, who is being tipped as one of the most interesting, cutting-edge chefs in Europe at the moment, to your list.

Another avowed locavore, he sources his ingredients from the farms on his doorstep at Dranouter and fishing boats on the nearby North Sea to produce highly technical, progressive and beautifully minimal food in an oasis of calm in the west Flanders countryside.

• Sample dishes: North Sea bass, green celery, purslane and potato; sole, elderberry, capers and Brussels sprouts.
• Sample prices: tasting menu – €120; wine selection – €40.
• indewulf.be