With New York placing 6 of its restaurants in the top 50 and Paris 5, proud locals who were calling London the number one restaurant city only yesterday may have been having second thoughts this morning. I too found myself reassessing my position on the matter, only from the opposite perspective: last night was the first time since moving to London 5 years ago I felt inclined to place it above Paris and New York, my prior cities of residence, as the world’s gastronomic capital.

Could this be the reversal of a starstruck food obsessive gone gooey after breathing the same heady air as celebrated chefs René Redzepi and Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal? Potentially, yes. Did I maybe drink one too many mugs of smoke-breathing Guildhall Punch chilled with dry ice at the Awards after party? Not that I remember.

Mostly I was moved by the great hospitality of London, not merely to this international gathering of elite chefs but, more significantly, to their ideas, their accomplishments, their influence.

After the awards I followed Adrià around, snapping photos and waiting for a moment alone with the master. When I got it I asked him through an interpreter what was required of the diner, what made a world’s best restaurant diner?

“They should enjoy themselves and,” replied Adrià, pausing for emphasis, “they must be open-minded”.

That, I thought afterwards, was London: unburdened by traditions set in soil and wide open to discovery, innovation and foreign influence. In the UK, unlike in France, gastronomic chauvinism, justified or not, is rooted in the freedom to look overseas and find what’s best, a glorious task the nation’s food enthusiasts share with the organisers and judges of the 50 Best. The bias for the new over the old is manifest.

Blumenthal denied this had been a rough night for the UK before revealing how delighted he was to see so many of his foreign chef friends, perhaps including a few selected at the expense of his overlooked British colleagues. The best thing about the awards, he said, was their expanding global reach. In his eyes the rankings, for all their subjectivity, were an accurate reflection of modern gastronomy and a new spirit of international exchange.

“15 to 20 years ago the great chefs of France would accuse each other of stealing ideas,” said Blumental. “They were very competitive.” Now if he wants to nick an idea he calls the chef behind it on the phone, as he did with Massimiliano Alajmo, a fellow top 20 chef (from Le Calandre in Padua) also inclined to do strange things like filling a syringe with ragu. (Remember the spag bol from In Search of Perfection on the BBC?)

End of the day, The S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants 2010 is, as Achatz of Alinea, the highest-ranking US restaurant says, “a list”. What could executive chef Daniel Boulud have possibly done in the space of a year for his Daniel to climb from 41st best to 8th best restaurant in the world (apart from garnering a 3rd Michelin star)? Are there really 31 dining destinations on the planet superior to The French Laundry?

“You can’t put too much into it,” said Achatz, as if to warn himself not to get too high – or low. “You can’t hit yourself over the head about it.”

It was heartwarming to see Redzepi accepting his award with 7 members of his kitchen brigade, all of them wearing t-shirts bearing a photo of an 8th – Ali, a Gambian dishwasher who couldn’t get a visa and was left behind in Copenhagen.

“The statement is, we miss him,” said Redzepi, “It is a team. If you surround yourself with people you love anything is possible.”

Does this spirit of teamwork, I asked the unassuming heir to Adrià and Blumenthal, signal the downfall of the tyrant chef?

“I can be angry sometimes,” he replied. “It lasts 5 minutes. Nothing is worth putting yourself through that type of crazy fighting. This isn’t the Nobel Prize.”

Still, he conceded, winning the World’s Best Restaurant prize “wasn’t all that bad”.

So how did I end up sacrificing a summer Saturday to Westfield London, “the largest in-town shopping and leisure destination in Europe” from “the world’s largest listed retail property group by equity market capitalisation“? My first inclination is to do what any man would do in a similar situation: blame my wife, who was desperate to find a pair of shoes to wear to her sister’s wedding. With 29 shoe stores at Westfield I rated her chances of finding a suitable pair as high as 15 percent.

To you I will own up to ulterior motives. First, I was curious to see what was left of the summer sales at Vans, Geox, Desigual and Habitat. Secondly, I’d heard there was an Apple store. But mostly I was eager to try the foie gras-topped duck burger at Croque Gascon, the southwest French fastfood from the creators of the upmarket Club Gascon and its bistro-class spinoff, Comptoir Gascon. At Club Gascon I had admired the culinary wit of chef Pascal Aussignac. I loved his foie gras brioche club sandwich, which delivered its crunch via bacon sliced as thin as an estate agent’s sincerity. At the Taste of London festival in Regent’s Park I’d enjoyed a mini-version of his Croque Gascon duck burger. I needed to experience the real thing, sur place, and that necessitated my entering the mother of all shopping malls and coping with the sort of challenges I thought I’d left behind. Like mustard that won’t come out of its container.

When having frites I like to ask for both mayonnaise and mustard, mix the two and, voilà, I have Dijon mayo for dipping. At Croque Gascon I tore open and squeezed one of the yellow stick sachets they served me and only a tiny dab of mustard oozed out. I opened a second sachet and a third and still did not have enough mustard for my Dijon mayo.  I was furious.

Croque Gascon sources its mustard sticks from Soreal Ilou, a French producer of condiments for the food services sector. Two days after my scene at the mall I emailed the company and asked 2 questions: How many grams of mustard were there in a stick? What was the advantage of this small dosage? Within 2 hours I had a response from Jean-Jacques Gonzalez, Directeur Commercial Restauration. He noted there were 4 grams per stick and that although their Dijon was also sold in 12-ounce sachets, it was a strong mustard and 4 grams of it were often sufficient. In closing, Monsieur Gonzalez reasoned I must be an amateur de moutarde and generously offered to send me some Dijon sticks.  Great, I thought: if he sends me 30 I’ll have enough mustard to dress a salad.

I did get around to trying the duck burger accessorised with a silky escalope of griddle-fried foie gras. At first I admired the firm, almost crunchy texture of the chopped-duck patty, as I had at Taste of London. It did not measure up to the foie gras burger pioneered by Michel Trama at L’Aubergade in Puymirol, France or the foie gras-filled sirloin and short rib burger created by Daniel Boulud for db Bistro Moderne in New York, but it was hardly their equal in cost either. The price, recently dropped from £12.50 to £10.50, was unusually accessible for so silly an extravagance.

Soon, however, my outlook darkened. The foie gras had retained its texture, despite the grill cook’s best efforts to incinerate it, but so too had the duck burger. I yearned for something soft and juicy, such as a hamburger. Admittedly, by this point I was not in the best of moods. I had just discovered a fresh mustard stain over the right pocket of my pants. Just my luck: I can only manage to squeeze out a few measly molecules of mustard from 3 sachets and all of it ends up on my lap.

“You see,” I complained to my wife, pointing to the stains. “This is why I hate shopping malls.”