Depends on who creates the list.

A list is as valuable as it's creator and the criteria he uses in creating the list. There are some incredible restaurants in the world, most of them horrendously expensive. Depending upon the city in which they are, it is usually possible to have an outstanding meal in many restaurants. Paris is an excellent example. I ate in a 1 Michelin star restaurant about 15 years ago and it was a lovely meal, but all the other meals I had were in restaurants with no star at all. Fabulous meals! In fact, when Obama took his family to Paris with him, they ate in two of them. It's hard to have a bad meal in Paris.

One of my favorite NYC restaurants is never on anyone's "best" lists but then it serves a very traditional French cuisine. I go there for their amazing individual cheese soufflé with truffle oil drizzled on top - TDF!

I would consider myself a "foodie" but I'm not interested in pretentious miminalizism in food. My daughter is right now in the process of supervising the opening of a hotel and it's destination restaurant in a Midwest city. The new chef is going back to a very traditional menu as this hotel is a totally gutted and refurbished one in the shell of a very famous hotel that had a restaurant that was always a "special occasion" place. So, he's cooking Lobster Thermador etc, - haven't seen that on any menu in decades. DD keeps sending me pictures and I'm dying!

as @sushipup wrote, it depends on which lists. The two most famous are the World's Best 50 list (sponsored by San Pelligrino) and of course the Michelin Guide. I've also seen some done by various magazines. Both have faced criticism and both tend towards Euro-centric fine dining, and are male-heavy. But the restaurants on the Top 50 (really Top 100) are usually all highly rated Michelin restaurants and highly regarded (and appear with top local reviews, Gault Millau, Zagat, etc) -- the Pelligrino list is more wide ranging in geographic coverage, and there are other discrepencies. I think it is a favorite sport of people who hunt down these high end restaurants to quibble with the ratings. (ETA -- I'm not personally one of them -- while I've had the Michelin-starred experience we tend to prefer good, creative food in all styles, in all levels of formality. Sitting through a 4 to 5 hour, 10+ plate tasting menu is not my ideal style).

Like the commercial jingle says, "Sometimes you feel like a nut.....sometimes you don't."

Excellent food comes at all price points. What you are paying for at the very highest levels is appearance and consistency.

There is a top-level young chef in the CA Wine Country we have followed for years. Because he has young kids, when the upscale prix fixe winery restaurant he was cooking at, closed down, he took a position as exec chef at a casual, moderate-priced cafe-style restaurant instead.

Based on our meal, and a subsequent meal by my niece, we both felt the food is erratic. Not because of quality of ingredients, but because the line cooks at his current restaurant are simply not as skilled -- nor as highly paid -- as his former staff at the previous winery restaurant. They are distressingly inconsistent on dishes, compared to the courses where the EC is concentrating his hands-on attention.

I have a private email list where I share our restaurant reviews, and one of the points I emphasize is that after over fifty years of dining out, consistency is the most difficult quality to achieve.

Do I pay attention to "Best Restaurant" lists? It's a factor in some of the restaurants we select to try, but not the biggest determinant. What the Michelin inspectors look for is not always what we like. OTOH, we have discovered some excellent one- and two-starred Michelin recommendations, along with some of their Bib Gourmand choices. But some others we have considered to be just so-so, or simply not our style.

There are many who slavishly follow lists, and even more who are Instagram fanatics. The phrase commonly used to describe them is "trophy chef hunters". Some of them really do know gourmet food; but some don't.

I belong to a number of food forums and am on the mailing lists of at least a dozen food bloggers and food critics. But you still have to filter out any recommendations based on how their tastes differ from yours.

The advantage of the Net is that you'll get leads to restaurants you would otherwise never know about. It's the serendipity of the experience that lends spice to dining out, no matter whose recommendation you take.

consistency is the most difficult quality to achieve --Jakkom

Too true. I never thought to put it that way, but that sums up the problem with fine dining nowadays. When I was young, top restaurants had a limited clientele and worked assiduously to maintain their reputations. Nowadays, short of machine made fast food, you're much more likely to get consistency from In-'N-Out burger (scratch made by people fast food) than most of the fine dining places I've eaten in recently. to the point where I've pretty much lost my desire for a "good meal" out.

Ricky, remember that listacles are some of the best clickbait out there. Most of the lists you'll see are about pleasing the advertisers. Better to get favorites from forum members, or some other good word of mouth.

Of course, then there was the time not long ago that my mouth was watering when I found out the restaurant we'd be eating at still had the most wonderful duck dish still on the menu (which change by season). I asked for the same temperature as previously (I do prefer duck to be cooked), and that was right. That was the only thing that was right. The first time, it was sublime. The second, it was inedible. A few weeks ago, I thought I would have another try at the chicken marsala from a neighborhood place that's trying to be fine dining, but sort of not quite. The first time I'd had it there, it was toe curlingly good. The second time, same preparation, there wasn't anything one would send it back for, but it was meh.

How can one recommend a place and a dish when you never know if it'll actually be good?

I can without qualm recommend a double double animal style with raw onion slice. I have no qualms about recommending any In-'N-Out at all, though if you get fries, be sure to say how you want them done (I recommend well, or extra well if you're putting sauce or other goop (or full on animal) on top of them), because their basic unspecified is floppy and pale. Because it's drive thru, you even hear celebrities on Oscar night talking about getting a double double on the way to the show. And if you really don't care for it, or prefer turkey, there's always Fatburger.

Or this non-existence fake restaurant that someone managed to turn into Tripadvisor's #1 dining spot in London through trickery.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor

Funny!

I have several techniques that we use when traveling abroad to find the best restaurants in the world.

Breakfast - eat at the hotel or B&B (uh, you paid for it) especially if it's free. Filling up on a heavy meal before sightseeing is foolish. You need fuel, but it's best to have a snack mid-morning. Of course, there are places where breakfast is a must and the concierge or innkeeper can guide you to them. I would have to say that world-wide, street-food breakfast is the best you'll eat in any major city.

Lunch - this is a big meal for us and probably the most important of the day. I have no problem eating a heavy lunch, crashing for a few hours, and then hitting the city bricks at night for a light dinner. So, how do you find the best place for lunch during the week in the middle of a city? Follow the business people. Many years ago I had a week in Rome on business. Every day, we followed a group of secretaries through a series of side streets and back alleys to some of the best Italian food I've ever eaten. Massive lunch buffets, all with fresh food from the salads to the desserts, where lunch - all you could eat - was just a few bucks per person. There's a guy with a rolling cart who stations himself across the street from the Marriott in San Jose, Costa Rica at lunchtime. If you want fresh, grilled fish on a stick with fresh grilled veggies and some hot sauce that will take the paint off your car, go see him. The concierge in the Marriott is paid to recommend a local tourist trap down the block, but eats his lunch every day at this guy's cart.

Dinner - forget the guidebooks and online lists (as I've now learned) and trust the people who live and work where you are visiting. This sounds like such a simple, common sense solution, but you'd be amazed at how quickly a tourist will tap their Yelp button and trust a bunch of invisible strangers. I remember being led to a sushi bar in Amsterdam where the fish was world-class quality and the chef and I were able to communicate in Japanese! No one else in the place spoke any other language than Dutch. And if you're in just about any tropical resort, get off the property and eat dinner where the locals eat. Your room may have 5-stars but the local fare has been watered down to appeal to a wider range of palates.

Stateside, the same rules apply although here in the US, a super restaurant can flounder the day after the reviews are written. Longevity is not a feature of the restaurant business, as opposed to overseas where a restaurant will be in the same family for decades. Talk about consistency.

Ricky, I like your sense. :) Like, eat lunch where the cops eat. :) I'll add that I've also had great luck in heavy places by following local people to good food.

Blfenton, that was amazing! The sample menu was so amazingly ridiculous! I was splitting my sides. I don't think the people who were trying to book could possibly have actually read it. Much of it isn't even food!