Strange as it may seem, before the star-studded World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards night in Melbourne, there was some anxiety about whether there would be any food.

“In New York there was nothing before the awards – no canapés, no wine,” said one veteran of this event.

The guys doing the live stream in the media room had ordered in Indian. “Uber eats. Do you want some?”

A wine writer sat at the bar and said in a vaguely panicked voice, “Didn’t anyone read the fine print on their ticket? Was I the only one? It advised to eat beforehand.”

But of course there was food, courtesy of Neil Perry from the Rockpool restaurant group, and lots of it. Huge sides of beef, kangaroo and tuna were on slabs before 900 of us filed into ceremony in the Royal Exhibition Building. When we came out an hour or so later they’d been barbecued, sliced, garnished and were ready to eat. There was plenty of booze, too.

In the hall – as Rockpool wait staff were circling with food – there were other circles. Chefs from all over the world were surrounded by groups of their hometown media and fans, who gathered close for selfies. People largely stuck with their tribes – the food writers and critics in their huddles, the chefs with their friends, the PR types buzzing between the two groups.

The superstar chefs wore red scarves, like football fans. It was hard to miss the fact that most of the red scarves were worn by men. At the awards presentation counting down the 50 best, there was an Oscars-style camera that panned across the audience and then beamed on to a massive screen on stage. The camera lingered on stars such as Heston Blumenthal.

The host, the English TV presenter Mark Durden-Smith, had done this before. He whipped through the names at a pace. When a restaurant was placed the chefs stood up and were cheered and then sat back down. There were no speeches. Academy Awards take note. When a winner couldn’t be there, they appeared via ghastly Skype videos, looking like hostages.

I sat down the back, next to a food blogger who whispered furiously to me throughout the ceremony. She’d been shocked by the amount of people she’d seen sleeping on the streets of Melbourne and, while simultaneously tweeting the winners as they were announced, she murmured about Rome and the fall, and how in all these great societies before a collapse there had been a decadent food culture.

When I left the after-party about 2am it was just getting started. Hours later on Instagram I saw photos of chefs standing on the bar spraying the crowds with champagne.

Everyone loves a list – and this one, built from quiet beginnings by the British magazine Restaurant, is now the most loved in the restaurant world. (Although there are plenty of detractors – some of which call themselves Occupy 50.)

For the punters – international foodies, the monied or just the obsessives - the 50 Best is the supreme organising principle. The list can double as a culinary bucket list, with bookings made years in advance and the foodie trekking off to some obscure Spanish village for a meal. For chefs a place on the list can be the culmination of decades of work and innovation in the kitchen, and is powerful enough to transform their business overnight. The restaurants became global household names. They stop being mere places to eat and instead become brands. Bloomberg reported that after Noma in Copenhagen secured the top spot in 2010 100,000 people tried to book a table.

A place on the list will not only attract diners in their legions, but staff too. They’ll move to places like Birregurra, the tiny Victorian town (688 residents in the 2006 census) where Dan Hunter has his restaurant Brae (No 44), for the chance to work with someone who has cracked the list.

Tourism authorities would be remiss not to see the marketing opportunities in all this. And Tourism Australia and Visit Victoria have been canny. Lots of Australians know that Melbourne does great food – but does the rest of the world? You’ve got to get the world here – and hope the word spreads. Tourism Australia spent $800,000 securing the sponsorship for the event, then helped foot the tab for the hundreds of media, judges and chefs who flew out to Australia. All but three of the winners in the top 50 were in Melbourne for Wednesday night’s event – and with them are media from their home countries and beyond. According to Visit Victoria, 92 international chefs made the journey alongside, 74 international media outlets from 40 countries.

A spokeswoman for Tourism Australia told me: “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants is the third phase of Restaurant Australia after Invite the World to Dinner and Noma Australia. Since the start of RA, international incremental spending on food and wine has increased by more than $1.2bn or 29%. Visitor spend specifically on food and wine in Australia in 2016 grew by $341m year on year – one in five dollars spent by international visitors.”

Australia’s wooing of the culinary dollar started in earnest in 2013. In an interview with the New Yorker in 2015 Tourism Australia’s head, John O’Sullivan, told of how he had invited 86 international “cultural influencers” to Australia for food and wine-based experiences, with national and state tourism boards picking up the travel costs.

Among those who came were journalists, food writers and voters in the 50 Best (the voters are anonymous but O’Sullivan says voters would have inevitably been among the invitees). In 2014, with the “influencers” flown in and assembled, the group were treated to experiences including a six-hour dinner in Hobart prepared by some of the country’s top chefs – Neil Perry, Peter Gilmore and Ben Shewry – that moved from food cooked in firepits on the banks of the Derwent to guests arriving at Mona for a six-course candlelight feast. The cost to Tourism Australia for the dinner alone was $1.5m.

The next year, Australia’s restaurants on the 50 Best list doubled from two to four.

Then it was announced that Australia would host the World’s 50 Best awards in 2017 – only the second time the 15-year-old award has been held outside its home in London. Last year it was in New York.

The strategy is to sell Australian produce, wine and restaurants as hard as Australia has sold its natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef, and reach travellers who will plan their trips around memorable meals. And as voters in next year’s 50 Best must have eaten a meal in a restaurant they vote for – it can be presumed that more Australian restaurant names will appear on next year’s list.

About 100 visitors were sent by Visit Victoria on “foodie adventures” to sample meals in regional restaurants and visit producers and farms. Some guests were flown around in helicopters on food safaris that took in wineries and top restaurants such as Brae. There was a lunch for other visitors in a far-flung saltpan. This week Tourism Australia is sending some 60 chefs and media on similar food adventures across Australia.

Last weekend I accompanied a journalist from Texas and a chef from Hong Kong to several farms and restaurants in central Victoria where time and again we were shown the paddock-to-plate ethos in action. One minute we were on a chicken farm near Castlemaine – picking up the eggs that these healthy, happy hens had laid, and an hour later we were eating the eggs.

It is Australia’s produce that is as much a part of the narrative the tourist boards are pushing as the chefs and their restaurants.

Not that the chefs have been ignored. On a laneway wall outside the Melbourne foodie favourite Chin Chin, the street artist Heesco painted portraits – in a realist style – of five leading chefs: Blumenthal, the winner of the lifetime achievement award, Daniel Humm from the No 1-ranked restaurant in the list, Eleven Madison Park in New York; Massimo Bottura from the No 2-placed Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy; Joan Roca from El Celler de Can Roca in Catalonia (No 3), and Shewry from Attica in Melbourne (“the best restaurant in Australasia”). All week chefs have been running master classes in the city, including one that involved putting gum into foie gras to make it chewy and stretchy and then tying the foie gras into a bow.

O’Sullivan told me via email: “When one of the best chefs in the world, Massimo Bottura, says we’ve raised the bar and he doesn’t know how any destination can host this event any better, then I think we can justifiably be proud of our efforts.

“The events this week in Melbourne, including the awards, have been incredible and to be honest that’s just the start … It’s an unprecedented opportunity for us to tell our Restaurant Australia story and hopefully turn these hugely influential guests into lifetime advocates of our country, and the people, produce and places which make our culinary offering truly world-class,” he said.

Whatever the economic and tourist benefits to Australia may be, it was definitely a swell party.