Designed to dine in: the Prix Versailles Most Beautiful Restaurants 2026 list

Suspended 100 metres above street level within the sky concourse linking the two towers of One Za’abeel, a complex that includes one of the world’s longest cantilevered structures (designed by Tokyo-based practice Nikken Sekkei), Nobu Dubai was designed by Rockwell Group around the building’s high ceilings and crisscrossing geometries. A monumental custom lighting system runs from the entrance through to the private dining room, unifying a space that takes in unobstructed city views by day and a backdrop of city lights after dark.

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Founded by Alexander Schrack, with interiors by Theresa Obermoser, Le Fou deliberately sets a Parisian nocturnal register against Vienna’s own tradition of formal café culture. The layout unfolds as a sequence of interconnected rooms, each with its own character: a main lounge in rust and terracotta, a golden lounge with a leopard-print private area.

Silk, mohair velvet, natural stone and patinated metal surfaces build a material language around longevity rather than finish. Low light levels and shadowed corners complete the atmosphere after dark; the contrast with Vienna’s daylit café culture is deliberate and evident.

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Architect Jakob Sprenger and creative director Antonia Crespí designed Monti’s Gstaad address around the spectacle of the mountain terrace, taking Alpine conventions of warm wood, natural textures and local craftsmanship as a starting point rather than a formula. Woven bronze room dividers, referencing basket-weaving techniques, structure the dining room without enclosing it; exposed beams, customised woven carpets, and mohair banquettes establish a materiality that is locally rooted and formally restrained. The design avoids the rustic Alpine clichés of timber-and-antler decoration, opting instead for contemporary craft that draws on local traditions without mimicking them.

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On the fifth floor of The Henderson, Zaha Hadid Architects’ first completed building in Hong Kong (opened in 2023), AB Concept designed a dining room that responds to the building’s fluid geometry with rounded lines, delicate timber posts, and a sculptural ceiling. 

The main dining area is organised around carefully arranged nooks; a separate private dining room features wall art drawn from the chef’s personal history, including imagery inspired by his mother, Young Hee Back. Chef Akira Back, a former professional snowboarder of Korean-American heritage, built his culinary identity around a fusion of Korean, Japanese, and global influences, a theme reflected in the room’s design.

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Also within The Henderson, Hirsch Bedner Associates designed Hana no Kumo ("flower cloud") for Chef Ogawa Masaru as a 24-seat sanctuary across two rooms, structured around the kappou format, in which the chef cooks in view of the dining room. Soft timber, washi paper, stone surfaces and a resin ice sculpture at the entrance establish a palette calibrated to the shokunin philosophy of disciplined devotion to craft and seasonality. Dynamic white-to-pink lighting references sakura blossom. At 24 seats across two rooms, it is the most intimate of the three Henderson restaurants by some distance.

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Inside the House of Dior in Sanlitun, Beijing, whose sculptural facade was designed by Christian de Portzamparc, Anne-Sophie Pic’s restaurant centres its interior, designed by Peter Marino Architect, on the couture house’s visual language. Black-and-white photographs of Dior silhouettes share wall space with a reproduction of a René Bouché portrait of Christian Dior. 

Also on display are three works commissioned from Chinese contemporary artist Hong Hao, whose practice is rooted in the systematic collection and classification of everyday objects. Pic, one of only a handful of female chefs worldwide to hold three Michelin stars, frames the restaurant as a meeting point between French couture culture and Chinese contemporary art.

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At the top of The Henderson, Studio Paolo Ferrari’s Peridot operates on an entirely different register from its building-mates below. Over 20,000 hand-crafted lights clad the space, giving it what the studio describes as a “Natural Futurism” quality: part deconstructed disco ball, part living organism, in a signature green palette anchored by a grand piano in green overlooking the city skyline. The cocktail menu is seasonal and vegan; the design is maximalist.

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Cairo-based architect Mohamed Badie designed Escā Playa on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast as a structure that reads as geological rather than constructed: surfaces of mineral coatings and coral aggregations suggest a formation shaped by wind and tide rather than a built brief. Shade and light move through the spatial sequence, continuously blurring the boundary between interior and exterior, and the scale shifts as guests move through the space. 

Ras El Hekma, on Egypt’s north-western Mediterranean coast, is one of the country’s most significant new resort developments; Escā Playa is among the first buildings there to treat the landscape as a design constraint rather than a backdrop.

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Finlandia Hall, Alvar Aalto’s 1971 performance and convention centre on the edge of Töölönlahti Bay, is among Finland’s most significant postwar buildings and the venue where the Helsinki Accords, the landmark Cold War agreement on European security and human rights, were signed in 1975. 

A renovation launched in 2021 brought the building up to contemporary standards; design agency Fyra reimagined the dining spaces within a protected structure, preserving Aalto-designed furniture and complementing it with new bespoke pieces. Each space was given its own identity to avoid pastiche, working within the original material and tonal palette rather than against it.

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The European debut of the New York institution occupies the former American Embassy on Grosvenor Square, a building designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1960, vacated when the Embassy relocated to Nine Elms in 2017. Ken Fulk’s interiors deploy velvet banquettes, mosaics and lacquered woodwork as the backdrop for a collection of contemporary art including works by Ai Weiwei and the late René Ricard. 

A hand-painted mural depicting a fictional evening at the restaurant carries visitors down the grand staircase to the lower-level bar and dining room. In architectural terms, the Saarinen building is the most significant address Carbone has occupied.

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Set within a 270,000-square-metre working winery in Pune Wine Country, surrounded by 16 square kilometres of reserve forest, Rosso occupies Hotel Irada, a tile-roofed property whose vernacular references the agricultural landscape of Maharashtra. Humming Tree designed the restaurant around a bar where green marble meets Solomonic columns of polished wood, a citation of Italian Baroque that sits in deliberate tension with its Indian setting. 

Pune Wine Country, in Maharashtra’s Sahyadri foothills, has developed significantly over the past two decades into one of India’s most productive wine-producing regions; Rosso is the most formally ambitious dining space to have opened within it.

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Located on the main square of Mareterra, Monaco’s new waterfront district built on land reclaimed from the sea and inaugurated in 2024, Marlow was designed by artist and architect Hugo Toro around a fictional British character, a reference to the historical presence of British visitors on the Riviera from the mid-eighteenth century. Spaces arranged around a sculptural central bar each serve as a small cabinet of curiosities, with custom-made furniture where different periods intersect.

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Described as Los Angeles’ first Afro-Caribbean restaurant, Lucia was designed by Preen Inc. around a clubhouse register, where tropical textiles, a coral-and-green palette, and shell and palm motifs create an interior that evokes nighttime island culture. 

Music is structural to the concept: a DJ positioned behind the smoked glass of the kitchen window plays rap, hip-hop and traditional music by Black artists throughout service. Founded by Sam Jordan with Chef Cleophus Hethington, Lucia positions Afro-Caribbean cuisine within a mid-century glamour framework that draws on the jazz-age supper clubs of Harlem and the hotel culture of the mid-century Caribbean.

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On the third floor of the House of Dior Beverly Hills, Peter Marino designed a dining room oriented around garden colours: a green wall, a monumental 2025 painting by Nicole Wittenberg entitled Gardens of Courances, and a palette drawn from the gardens of the Château de La Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s Provençal home. 

A bar of ebony and onyx sits beneath a ceiling of sculpted white rose petals; a terrace overlooks Rodeo Drive. Dominique Crenn, the first female chef in the United States to hold three Michelin stars, leads a cuisine that Marino’s interiors position within a specifically Californian reading of Parisian elegance.

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Chef Brian Nasajon worked with Saladino Design Studios on Mottai, a Japanese-French restaurant in Coral Gables organised around an open sushi bar beneath a canopy at the centre of the dining room. The spatial arrangement draws from Japanese principles of discipline and minimalism; custom furniture in curved forms and tactile materials softens the formal precision.

Coral Gables, a planned city within Greater Miami known for its Mediterranean Revival architecture, has built a fine-dining identity over the past decade, largely anchored in European and Latin American culinary traditions; Mottai’s Japanese-French register adds a spare counterpoint.

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Interior architect Tristan du Plessis designed Amura around an imagined kelp forest, with deep green hues, woodwork and bronze details establishing a marine atmosphere in which the open kitchen serves as the theatrical centre. The brief responds to the meeting of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans off Cape Town’s coastline, one of the world's most biodiverse marine environments. 

Chef Ángel León, whose Cádiz restaurant Aponiente holds three Michelin stars and is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious seafood kitchens in Europe, brings a Mediterranean framework to South African oceanic produce.

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