Watch: This is the world's best restaurant

Italy's Osteria Francescana,which serves innovative and artful Italian food, was crowned the world's best restaurant for the second time on Monday at an awards ceremony put on by British trade magazine Restaurant, beating out top eateries in Spain and France.

Run by chef Massimo Bottura, the restaurant in Modena, Italy pipped last year's winner, New York's "Eleven Madison Park," in the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards, after first taking the honour in 2016. It is the only Italian establishment to have won the annual accolade.

"My heart has held up despite it all, I think it's a strong heart ... after all these years number two, number one, number one, number two," he told a news conference in Bilbao, Spain, where this year's event was held.

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"I am going to use this spotlight to show that chefs in 2018 are much more than the sum of their recipes," he said.

Places on the roster, created by William Reed Business Media, are based on a poll of more than 1,000 chefs, food critics and other industry experts around the world.

The top restaurants list's organisers praised "Bottura's contemporary cuisine, which challenges and reinvents Italian culinary tradition while make use of the finest produce from the Emilia-Romagna region."

El Celler de Can Roca, serving traditional Catalonian food by chefs and brothers Joan, Josep, and Jordi Roca in Girona, Spain, was the runner up. In third place was Mirazur, which serves French-Riviera-inspired food under Chef Mauro Colagreco, in Menton, France.

Bottura's father wanted him to become a lawyer but when he was 23-years-old Bottura, who was famous for rustling up culinary delights for his friends, dropped his law studies to open a Trattoria in Campazzo, in the countryside around Modena in the Po River Valley.

On his days off, he would study with French chef Georges Cogny, who had a restaurant two hours away.

He opened Osteria Francescana in 1995 after spending time in New York and Monaco.

There are no criteria for putting a restaurant on the list, which is based on an anonymous poll of more than 1,000 chefs, restaurant owners, food critics and other industry insiders from around the world.

Each member gets 10 votes and at least four of those votes have to go to restaurants outside their region.

While European eateries continued to dominate the awards, known as the Oscars of the fine dining world, all five continents were represented, with Bangkok'sGagganat five on the list and Lima'sCentralat six.