Chef Nutcha’s Baan Lao: Best Restaurant in North America

Nutcha Phanthoupheng of Baan Lao

On Wednesday night in Jamaica, at a gala at the Princess Grand Jamaica resort, Nutcha Phanthoupheng accepted the title of North America's Best Restaurant 2026 at the World Culinary Awards for Baan Lao Fine Thai Cuisine, her restaurant on the Steveston waterfront in Richmond, south of Vancouver. It is the first Canadian win, and Baan Lao was also named Canada's Best Restaurant for the third year running.

Now in their seventh edition, the World Culinary Awards are run by World Luxury Media Group as a sister programme to the World Travel Awards, which have been handing out hospitality honours since 1993. There are no anonymous inspectors, as with Michelin: winners are decided by online voting from registered members of the public and verified culinary professionals, with industry votes counting double. The highest scorer across Canada and the United States takes the North American title.

This year's category drew 22 Canadian and 18 American nominees, and past winners include The French Laundry, Le Bernardin and Atelier Crenn. Twenty seats of Royal Thai cooking finishing ahead of that company makes people far from Vancouver look up. None of this surprises me. Baan Lao debuted at No. 12 on the inaugural North America's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2025, and Canada's 100 Best named it the country's Best Destination Restaurant the same year. I have written about it twice, and left both times convinced it was one of Canada's most serious kitchens.

From the hospital ward to the kitchen

Chef Nutcha grew up on a family farm in Isaan, northeastern Thailand, growing rice, raising buffalo and foraging for mushrooms, wild honey and insects. She became a registered nurse and then a cancer researcher at Bangkok's Princess Chulabhorn Hospital, chosen by the Princess herself, before turning to cooking in 2019 after thirteen years in healthcare.

She watched patients on chemotherapy lose their appetite and strength, while others went home, ate what they loved and spent their last days with family. Hospitals, she concluded, had the treatment right and the eating wrong. "Appetite matters. Happiness matters," she wrote earlier this year.

She trained under Chumpol Jangprai of two-Michelin-starred R-Haan and royal chef Vichit Mukura, then opened Baan Lao in February 2021, in the middle of the pandemic.

Royal rules, peasant ingredients

Braised Water Buffalo Shank and Massaman Curry

Royal Thai cuisine is the most rule-bound cooking you will find in a Canadian dining room. Bones and pits are removed by a technique called pawk riew, flavours are balanced away from extremes, and the sous chef spends ten minutes carving each carrot gift box for one bite of the amuse-bouche. Produce comes from farms within 90 km, and the rice from 15 acres in Khon Kaen that have been in her family for 80 years.

What lifts Baan Lao beyond faithful reproduction is what sits at the centre of the plate. Water buffalo is peasant food in Thailand; she gives it court technique, much as Diego Rossi does with the quinto quarto at Trippa in Milano.

The eighteen-item tasting menu, From Thailand With Love, travels the four corners of the kingdom. Miyazaki A5 Wagyu arrives on a pandan leaf over smouldering charcoal. The massaman of braised buffalo shank yields to the side of a spoon, its sauce holding sweetness, salt and warm spice in perfect balance.

Then comes the twist: pad thai as the final savoury course, wrapped in an egg net woven strand by strand over four hours. Dessert, a smoked ice cream with sticky rice from the family fields, remains one of the best I have eaten anywhere.

Seven ways to drink

Baan Lao pours seven parallel flights, from wine and sake to two tea flights, each built by a different specialist. The cocktails are overseen by Kaitlyn Stewart, the first Canadian to win World Class Global Bartender of the Year, and borrow the kitchen's aromatics: tamarind, pandan, lemongrass, kaffir lime and palm sugar.

"This award encourages us to keep improving"

"I wanted to show people that Thai food is more than just street food and introduce them to the beauty of Royal Thai cuisine," Chef Nutcha said. "This award encourages us to keep improving."

"Our goal was to become the best Thai restaurant in North America," said co-owner John Phanthoupheng. "To be named the best restaurant overall is immensely gratifying."

What comes next

The couple are not slowing down. In May they opened MaKaam at Time Out Market Vancouver in Oakridge Park, serving modern takes on casual Thai classics. Next summer, two restaurants open side by side in Granville Island's Chain & Forge building: Baan Baan, Thai Farmer's Table & Bar, devoted to the charcoal-grilled, fermented flavours of Isaan, and Le KaNom, Thai Desserts & Caffe, serving gluten-free and dairy-free Thai sweets by day.

"Baan Baan means village or community, and Granville Island feels like that," she said. "It will allow people to experience my food in a more casual way."

Baan Lao proved that Bangkok's court cooking belongs among the continent's best restaurants. Baan Baan will bring the flavours of the Isaan farm where Chef Nutcha started out to a wider audience. For a chef who left medicine believing that appetite and happiness matter, both make the same case.

The case for another 50 Best List: The 50 Best Hotel Bars

When The 50 Best Bars 2026 was revealed here in Milano on 7 October, the city had its own headline: Moebius Milano at No. 2 and The Best Bar in Europe. Read further down the list, though, and another story appears. Only five of the fifty bars are inside five-star hotels. That raises a question worth asking out loud: should hotel bars get a ranking of their own? And if so, does the drinks world really have room for yet another list? Before getting to that, here is who runs the seven, and what makes each one work.

Connaught Bar, London (No. 8)

The highest-ranked hotel bar on the list remains the benchmark. Agostino Perrone has been Director of Mixology at The Connaught in Mayfair since 2008. His right hand, Pisa-born Giorgio Bargiani, joined in 2014 as a barback and rose to Assistant Director of Mixology; in June he won the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award at the first Europe's 50 Best Bars. The concept has never needed reinventing: the martini trolley rolls to your table and each drink is finished with house essences such as bergamot, myrtle and cardamom. Brexit or not, the team is still largely Italian, and it still delivers the best hospitality in London.

Argo, Hong Kong (No. 25)

Since November 2025 Argo has been led by Lyon-born Beverage Manager Jonathan Gabbay. His Argo Exploration menu moves away from lab-driven drinks toward collaborations with Hong Kong makers, from a punch built with a historic local coffee and tea house to a garnish drawn by a Wan Chai tattoo artist. In July Argo was named Best International Hotel Bar at the Spirited Awards.

BKK Social Club, Bangkok (No. 30)

One of the big climbers this year, up 19 places. Philip Bischoff, Beverage Manager and Four Seasons' beverage ambassador for Asia-Pacific, came over from Manhattan in Singapore and opened the bar in December 2020. The room is pure Latin American glamour on the Chao Phraya, and the current menu pays tribute to the places, people and parties of Mexico City.

Mimi Kakushi, Dubai (No. 42)

At Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach, this Rikas Group restaurant-bar takes its name from a 1920s Osaka hairstyle and leans fully into the jazz-age theme. Bar Manager Manja Stankovic's menu draws on the films of silent-era star Sessue Hayakawa, with drinks presented on movie reels. The signature is the Kori Kakushi Martini: ume-infused gin and a touch of vermouth, bottled and frozen inside a block of ice, then carved out at the table. It holds on to its title as The Best Bar in the Middle East.

Virtù, Tokyo (No. 48)

Thirty-nine floors above Otemachi, Virtù is an Art Deco room built on a Paris-meets-Tokyo idea, pairing vintage French spirits and aperitifs with Japanese whisky and seasonal ingredients. Head Bartender Keith Motsi, from Leeds, opened Equis at Four Seasons Beijing and ran Charles H. in Seoul, where he was named Bartenders' Bartender at Asia's 50 Best Bars 2022. This year Virtù was also a top-four finalist for Best International Hotel Bar at the Spirited Awards.

One List Too Many?

Five out of fifty, four from one hotel group. It is no surprise that some in the trade are asking whether luxury hotel bars deserve their own ranking. The harder question is whether anyone wants another list at all.

The case for is easy to make. Hotel bars play a different game, with corporate budgets and PR machines behind them and long opening hours. A dedicated list could recognise the many excellent ones missing from The 50 Best Bars.

Several notables that come to mind: Atrium Bar at Four Seasons Firenze, Stravinskij Bar at Hotel de Russie Rome, Igiea Terrazza Bar at Villa Igiea Palermo, The Bar at Aman Venice, The Donovan Bar at Brown’s Hotel London, Wing Lei Bar at Wynn Palace Macau, the Bulgari Bar in Milano, Rome and Tokyo, Darkside at Rosewood Hong Kong, Advocatuur Bar at Rosewood Amsterdam, Botanicum Bar at Huus Quell Gonten, Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris, Artesian at The Langham London, Dukes Bar in London, Origin Bar at Shangri-La Singapore, Maiga! Bar at TA'AKTANA in Labuan Bajo, Ambar at Mandapa in Ubud, The Hudson Rooms at Capella Hanoi, the Lobby Bar at EDITION Lake Como, The Portrait Bar at The Fifth Avenue Hotel NY, Punch Room at Tokyo EDITION Ginza, the Library Bar at Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, Rundle Bar at Fairmont Banff Springs, Lennon's at Rosewood Bangkok and Charles H. at Four Seasons Seoul. The format already exists elsewhere too: Tales of the Cocktail has its Best International Hotel Bar award, Forbes Travel Guide has its Star Bars, and 50 Best itself already ranks hotels with The World's 50 Best Hotels.

The case against is just as strong, and list fatigue is a big part of it. In a few years 50 Best has gone from one bar ranking to a world list, a 51 to 100 extension and three regional editions, each with its own sponsored awards. Every new list adds another ceremony, another round of voting and another set of titles, and each one dilutes the weight of the last. Then there is the principle: the list has always prided itself on putting grand hotel bars side by side with speakeasies and dive bars, and the Connaught's two years at No. 1 (2020 and 2021) prove hotel bars can win head-on. A separate ranking risks becoming a consolation prize, quietly pushing hotel bars out of the main conversation.

My feeling is that both can be true. The main list should stay open to everyone, and nobody needs a fourth regional edition. But a ranking that cuts across regions and looks only at hotels would answer a different question from the ones already being asked, and it would shine a light on a category that is producing some of the best hospitality in the world.