In what is undoubtedly one of the great envy-inducing achievements of recent times, one humble, rather hungry man has done the seemingly impossible: eaten at every one of the World’s Best 50 Restaurants.

FoodieHub founder Jeffrey Merrihue’s epic quest came to an end last month when he crossed Cape Town’s The Test Kitchen – #28 on last year’s list – off his personal one. He immediately felt “a sense of disappointment” at having “no more planning to do,” he said.

He needn’t worry too much, however. This year’s World’s Best 50 Restaurants list is set to be released next week, hopefully with a few new entries for him to seek out.

“I realised two years ago that I had inadvertently been to 30 of the World’s 50 Best and decided to seek out the remaining 20,” Merrihue said. “This was easier said than done as amongst the remaining 20 were restaurants scattered as far and wide as Shanghai, Melbourne, Cape Town, Santiago and the Swiss Alps.”

The Melbourne leg of Merrihue’s pilgrimage took him, of course, to Ben Shewry’s Attica (#32), which for the second year running was the only Australian restaurant to make the fabled top 50. (Sydney’s Quay and Sepia, and Brae in the Victorian town of Birregurra, made the second tier 51-100 list, appearing at #58, #84 and #87 respectively.)

“Attica was wonderful due to its focus on fresh, local ingredients, including the garden vegetables, wallaby and kangaroo, which you won’t find anywhere else,” Merrihue said. “I also loved Brae, where we had a great lunch on the way back from the Twelve Apostles.”

Merrihue’s favourite restaurant on the list, however, was Asador Etxebarri (#13) in the hills above Bilbao in the Spanish Basque Country, where grill-master Victor Arguinzoniz has reinvented the concept of European barbeque. “Even the butter is smoked,” Merrihue said.

He described Arguinzoniz’s rib-eye, sourced from eight-year old Spanish dairy cattle, as “by far the best steak of my life.”

“I have since been back with my wife to confirm that it was that good,” he said.

Merrihue’s achievement puts him in a unique position to comment on global dining trends, of which he said “the disappearance of overt luxury” was the most obvious.

“Only one restaurant in the top 50 has a chandelier and there are, amazingly, only seven with white tablecloths,” he said.

This will come as no surprise to Sydney diners, who have recently been subjected to a deluge of opinion pieces about the apparent death of fine dining following a spate of announced closures, most notably that of Neil Perry’s Rockpool and Mark Best’s Marque.

Merrihue said he feared that this push towards informality and simplicity would result in the eclipse of more traditional, process-heavy cooking techniques, such as those of the French, which he sees as being replaced by a more Japanese approach.

He said the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – originally the brainchild of Britain’s Restaurant magazine, now an independent venture known colloquially as “the San Pellegrino list,” though it dropped the water company’s title rights this year – was a useful corrective to the “unintentionally skewed view of world dining” that results from the Michelin star system’s “limited geography”.

“Michelin has an emphasis on the mighty dining titans of France and Japan,” he said, “which comes at the expense of many other worthy countries.”

“Also, Michelin’s focus on extreme luxury often comes at the expense of more relaxed environments like The Testing Kitchen in Cape Town and Noma in Copenhagen, which never received three stars from Michelin but has been #1 on the World’s 50 Best list multiple times.” (Noma, which ran a hugely popular 10-week pop-up in Sydney earlier this year, topped the list between 2010 and 2012 and then again in 2014.)

“Finally, the list has created a community of friends amongst the chefs,” Merrihue said, “who get to meet each other every year and are known to have visited each other frequently.”

“Chefs have done projects together that never would have happened without the list,” he said.

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2016 will be announced in New York City on June 13.