Each year, awards for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are celebrated at an event that draws leading chefs from around the globe. Attention tends to focus more on the winners, who can be catapulted to stratospheric levels of fame, than on the host cities, which have included such gastronomic centers as Las Vegas, New York City and London.
This month, the group announced that it would give out its 2026 awards in November in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a country that has drawn criticism for its human-rights record.
The choice did not immediately stir the kind of protest kicked up when the Louvre, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Basketball Association, and other groups have held events or established permanent outposts in Abu Dhabi.
But some prominent chefs are unsettled by the location.
Dominique Crenn, who attended the awards in Turin, Italy, last year when her flagship restaurant, Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, came in at No. 96 on an extended list, has decided against going to Abu Dhabi this year.
Ms. Crenn wrote in an email, “I must admit my sadness and surprise at this direction, which feels like a departure from the integrity 50 Best once represented.”
Women in the United Arab Emirates do not have equal rights in marriage, divorce and decisions about their children. It is illegal for same-sex couples to have sex and transgender people face many barriers, including a law against “disguising” in women’s clothes that carries a penalty of up to a year in prison.
Ms. Crenn, one of the world’s most prominent gay chefs and an outspoken advocate for gender equality in her profession, has a long history with the awards. She was named the World’s Best Female Chef in 2016, and has spoken about diversity and other topics onstage at 50 Best events.
When she was given the organization’s Icon Award in 2021, William Drew, the director of content for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, called her “an example of someone who speaks truth to power in every aspect of her life.”
Explaining her decision not to travel to Abu Dhabi, Ms. Crenn wrote, “I cannot separate my work from my values, and I remain firmly opposed to human rights violations, particularly those affecting women and the LGBTQ+ community.”
In a statement, the group behind the awards responded, “50 Best does not endorse violence, hate speech or the incitement of harm in any form. Any political views or policies in the region do not reflect the views or positions of the 50 Best organisation.”
In 2018, after years of complaints that almost all its awards went to male chefs, the group made several changes, including a “50-50 gender principle” for the panels that vote on the rankings. In an open letter, Hélène Pietrini, the director at the time, wrote that the organization “joins in calling for an industry where equality is a reality.”
Holding the World’s 50 Best ceremony in Abu Dhabi “marks a significant new chapter” for the awards, the group said this month. An auxiliary program, Middle East and North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants, has been held in Abu Dhabi each year since 2022. Like the global awards this November, those events were produced in partnership with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, a government agency.
“Having hosted Middle East & North Africa’s 50 Best Restaurants in Abu Dhabi since its inception in 2022, this has provided a strong foundation for welcoming the global gastronomic community for the first time in 2026,” the awards group said in its statement.
Silver Iocovozzi, the chef and an owner of Neng Jr.’s in Asheville, N.C., said the move “seems to be an intentionally out-of-touch decision.”
Neng Jr.’s has not been recognized by the World’s 50 Best, and Mr. Iocovozzi, a trans person, is not expecting an invitation to Abu Dhabi. Still, the location rankles.
“Do I want to support or say yes to events that put people in compromising positions or even at risk of being criminalized?” he said. “Hell no. I don’t think it’s right.”
Mr. Iocovozzi said that if he were invited, he might be tempted to accept “for the representation. But then again, representation without protection instantly puts my safety in danger.”
In its statement, the awards group responded to safety concerns by saying, “Our goal is to create a secure environment at all 50 Best programming venues in Abu Dhabi so we can celebrate our global culinary community.”
Still, Abu Dhabi has tried to keep pace. Since 2022, Michelin has published a guide to the city with funding from the Department of Culture and Tourism, handing out stars to an outpost of the nightclubby Chinese chain Hakkasan and an Italian restaurant overseen by the Milanese chef Antonio Guida. For the past three years, Michelin has put on an Abu Dhabi food festival, also sponsored by the tourism agency.
Museums, restaurants and other attractions have been fundamental to the United Arab Emirates’ Soft Power Strategy, an official policy adopted in 2017, in part “to establish its reputation as a modern and tolerant country that welcomes all people from across the world.”
A recent Human Rights Watch report on the emirates states, “These efforts to project a public image of openness are at odds with the government’s efforts to prevent scrutiny of its human rights violations.”
Observers abroad have charged that the image campaign papers over accusations that the government arrests and jails its critics, trains advanced forms of surveillance on residents and visitors, restricts the speech and behavior of L.G.B.T.Q. people, and censors the media. In a recent appraisal of press freedom in 180 countries around the world, Reporters Without Borders ranked the United Arab Emirates 168th, just above Cuba.
Although the World’s 50 Best awards and its spinoff regional lists have impressive geographic reach, the program is an elite undertaking by design, doling out honors to restaurants that few people can experience.
The group’s choice to celebrate in Abu Dhabi is “disappointing, but I am not surprised,” said Telly Justice, the chef and an owner of HAGS, a Manhattan restaurant that bills itself as “by Queer people for all people.”
“I don’t think there was ever a part of me that saw the World’s 50 Best as being receptive to progressive values.”
But Ms. Justice stopped short of criticizing the move, given recent events in this country.
“Speaking from the perspective of being a trans woman myself,” she said, “it’s hard to feel in a position to judge Abu Dhabi when the material conditions of being trans in the U.S. have changed so dramatically to the negative in the past couple of years.”
More than a dozen other chefs and owners from restaurants that have appeared on the World’s 50 Best list or one of its related awards did not reply to an email seeking a response, or said they had no comment.
Dining and Cooking