Michelin Stars
Joe Warwick
WHAT is it about chefs, restaurants and rubber you might ask yourself? Why is a guide that's sponsored by a Gallic tyre manufacturer held in such high esteem by so many chefs, gastronomic geeks and fine-dining savants?
While I'd like to able to tell you that the cult of the Michelin Guide has its roots in a particularly kinky French ménage à trois of food, fetishism and freemasonry, sadly - at least until Dan Brown publishes his next awful bestseller - the received wisdom is that the reality is more a mundane case of commonsense marketing.
In fact tiresome links between tyre manufactures and restaurant guides extend beyond Michelin, with Bridgestone sponsoring an Irish restaurant guide and - good luck on pronouncing this one if you're not Scandinavian - Hjulcentret sponsoring a Danish one. Across the Atlantic it's a case of chefs getting excited by petrol pumps, with Mobil sponsoring the dining guide that until Michelin's recent arrival - more of which later - mattered the most stateside. Back in the UK, a similar marketing logic that ties motoring to touring is the reason that the AA publishes a restaurant guide and the RAC used to produce one.
That Michelin remains the world's most influential gastronomic guide with unrivalled importance to the culinary establishment is a fact that even its greatest detractors - albeit through gritted teeth - find hard to deny.
Not launched in Britain until 1974, what today seems to have been rebranded as simply the Michelin Guide and is still widely known the 'Red Guide' (after its cover which trivia fans will know was blue until 1931) began life in France in 1900 as a modest promotional tool for the tyre manufacturer. The guide to hotels and restaurants was initially free for motorists: the company only started to charge for in 1920 to establish its credibility, after, legend has it, a pile of unread guides were discovered by Monsieur Michelin propping up a work bench in one of his garages.
Today Michelin's publishes restaurant guides that cover 23 countries worldwide and in 2006 decided to venture outside of Europe for the first time by launching a guide to New York. The noughties saw further US expansion with the publication of guides to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, in addition to which Michelin decided to enter into the Asian market starting with a guide to Tokyo in 2007, followed Kyoto, Osaka, and Hong Kong and Macau.
Each year the Michelin guide results are rolled out beginning with New York in October and finishing with the Main Cities of Europe in March. The UK and Ireland results come in mid-January. For this reason a lot of British chefs spend the early part of January, and in some cases the whole of their careers, obsessing about nothing else. Almost every chef of note has at some stage of their career flirted with a Michelin star fixation, the same way actors dream about the Oscars and I fixate about going out somewhere nice for lunch.
The reason the judgements of Michelin's inspectors are held in such high esteem by many chefs and restaurateurs seems to come down to two qualities, consistency and knowledge. Bolstering the egos of chefs aside, a Michelin rating all but guarantees more customers through a restaurant's door.
Competing guides vary in their editorial remit and consistency. Paid membership is required for restaurants to be to be included in directories such as the Relais & Chateaux Guides, while Harden's and Zagat are said to be the results of readers surveys and tout their punter power, and it's often hard to judge what criteria are being employed in Time Out and the AA. Michelin debatably has, above all other restaurant guides, exacting, incorruptible standards. Most Michelin inspectors have a professional qualification in hospitality management and are then trained/brainwashed by Michelin for a further six months.
Although it's not known if from then on in inspectors' cars must only wear Michelin tyres on pain of death and the exact rating process whereby restaurants are awarded one, two and, in only a handful of cases, three stars is still largely shrouded in secrecy: what we do know is that inspectors take into consideration the quality and compatibility of ingredients, the technical skill and flair of cooking, the integrity of flavours, the quality of the wine list, the balance and interest of the menu and, perhaps most crucially of all, consistency.
Michelin has been rightly criticised in the past for a French fine dining bias in its choice of restaurants and in being slow to react to change. Under the charge of its most recent director, the suave perma-tanned Jean-Luc Naret, the guide has moved into North America and Asia and tried to appear more inclusive and shake off it fusty Old World image to defend itself against charges of French culinary cultural imperialism.
The guides - in particular those focused on individual cities - have changed in style and now feature chatty copy where once there was only terse prose and pictograms. The French Michelin Guide is these days simultaneously published in English, where once such an idea was sniffed at with Gallic disdain. Michelin have also set themselves up nicely for the 21st century by embracing technology and developing an impressive website where you can search for their recommended restaurants worldwide and reformatting their guides for the iPhone.
Despite installing locally recruited inspectors outside of France, Michelin will always be accused of cheering disproportionately for restaurants that genuflect to the French style of cooking and service - mostly because they still do and probably always will.
But whereas as a decade ago it was still possible to define a distinct Michelin style of restaurant that was all about haute cuisine, hefty wine lists, waiters and fussy formality, Michelin stars are now held by an uncouth Brooklyn steakhouse and a modest dim sum counter in Hong Kong. No one can say that they haven' branched out. And perhaps most tellingly in terms of Michelin's new approach, this supposed mouthpiece of French culinary supremacy now rates Tokyo - not Paris - as the culinary capital of the world.