These 12 Restaurants Are Worth Traveling Across the World to Experience

If there’s a clichéd concept for food travel, it’s the bucket restaurant list. The idea, popularly thought to have come from the 2007 film, The Bucket List, might be only about 10 years old. But it feels as if it’s been kicking around much longer and is overused enough to have inspired listicles as random and useless as a roundup of the best fried chicken in Orange County, Calif.

That said, it’s a satisfying exercise to make a list and then check things off it. And destination restaurants make for a gratifying list. What follows is a list we (Bloomberg’s two restaurant writers) compiled that represent places we’ve traveled to that were so good we want to shout about them, along with spots that are on our own bucket lists. Included are a sublime restaurant in the hills of Provence to a no-frills dining room in Vietnam that cooks only one thing: catfish. Because yes, as clichéd as restaurant bucket lists are, we keep them, too.