Almost from the moment it began dishing out stars, in 1926, Michelin had been regarded as the Holy Writ of French gastronomy. This didn’t please everyone; A. J. Liebling was no fan of the Guide, decrying its influence as “a depressing example of the subordination of art to business.” But he was the rare heretic (and an American, besides); most French restaurant-goers happily submitted to its dictates. In time, it became rare to set foot in a French car that didn’t have a well-worn copy of the famous red book in its glove compartment or side pocket, and in a country in which dining truly was a national pastime, the annual publication of the Guide, with its promotions and demotions, was the Oscars of the eating class.
Likewise, since the days of Fernand Point and his contemporaries, chefs had been obsessed with satisfying one guest above all others: the anonymous Michelin inspector. If they could send him home happy, success was assured. For French chefs, Michelin wasn’t merely a source of approbation; it defined what it meant to eat well in France. In this sense, it was as much a beacon for haute cuisine’s practitioners as it was for its consumers. Years after Point’s death, one of his disciples, Alain Chapel, would describe the Guide Rouge as “a light to guide us.”
By outward appearances, the Guide was a dim, almost imperceptible, light, especially to modern diners accustomed to having exhaustive restaurant reviews available at the click of a mouse. In more than two thousand tissue-thin pages, it contained no actual descriptions of meals or settings. It provided only restaurant details—locations, contact information, prices, specialties of the house, amenities, days closed—some of which were conveyed via symbols rather than words. (It also included separate listings for hotels.) Alongside these were the main attraction, the ratings, expressed through the Guide’s most important symbol of all: a small star. It would be hard to think of a more potent emblem in any realm of human activity. A single star could validate a career and put an entire village on the map. Two stars brought regional fame, sometimes even national recognition. Three stars, the highest and rarest classification (the most restaurants in France ever to hold three stars at any one time was twenty-seven), conferred admission into the pantheon of France’s greatest chefs. With a third Michelin star, a chef not only became a gastronomic colossus; he became a cultural icon, as esteemed as any novelist, poet, musician, or artist.
But how to win Michelin’s benediction was far from clear. What distinguished a three-star restaurant from a two-star? Chefs were always welcome to visit the Guide’s offices on the Avenue de Breteuil in Paris (the Michelin company was based in Clermont-Ferrand) to discuss their status, and many availed themselves of the opportunity. However, the answers they received were as vague as those dispensed to inquiring journalists. Michelin said its ratings were based solely on the quality of the food and had nothing to do with the setting; that three- and two-star restaurants received more scrutiny than other establishments; and that its inspectors dined incognito and paid on the company tab. But Michelin wouldn’t reveal the number of inspectors it employed, never explained its decisions, and appeared to take pleasure in being evasive.
So chefs were left to draft their own road maps to the Promised Land, and many ultimately concluded that, contrary to Michelin’s mantra, the difference between a two-star rating and a three-star rating had little to do with the cooking and a lot to do with the ambience. The Michelin Man, they came to believe, had a yen for luxury and wanted his surroundings to be as sumptuous as his food. Paul Bocuse won his third star supposedly after prettifying his bathrooms, and the lesson drawn by other chefs and restaurateurs was that a baronial atmosphere was a prerequisite to earning Michelin’s ultimate accolade. In 2007 a trio of European economists—Olivier Gergaud, Linett Montaño Guzmán, and Vincenzo Verardi—published a study showing that Michelin was indeed influenced by the décor and even by the quality of the neighborhoods in which restaurants were located. Their regression analysis led them to conclude that the Guide “overcompensates chefs who invest heavily in their setting (and location) and undercompensates those who strictly focus on cuisine quality.” Several generations of French chefs could have told them that, without having to resort to the fancy math.
Over the years, Michelin’s primacy did not go unchallenged. The Guide Kléber, put out by another tire company, was its main rival for several decades. Gault Millau came along in the 1970s and briefly threatened Michelin’s reign. During its heyday, Gault Millau generated more buzz than the Guide Rouge, and in championing nouvelle cuisine, it also influenced culinary fashion in a way that Michelin had never done. However, it didn’t succeed in dethroning Michelin; nor, apparently, did it give the venerable Guide much of a fright. Even as it was being pursued in its own backyard, Michelin had turned its critical eye to restaurants and hotels outside of France, and, by the mid-2000s, it would be publishing guides to twenty European countries. In moving into these other markets, Michelin was not just spreading its reach; it was reinforcing the centuries-old notion that in matters of food and wine, France knew best. For a time at least, chefs and diners in the countries that fell within Michelin’s expanded purview welcomed its arrival and generally treated its verdicts as sacrosanct. As in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, a three-star rating in London, Munich, or Madrid was headline news and invariably turned a restaurant into a magnet for locals and tourists alike.
But in 1999, the unthinkable happened: A pair of three-star recipients in London, Marco Pierre White and Nico Ladenis, announced (separately) that they were handing back their étoiles and taking their restaurants in new directions. If it wasn’t Michelin’s Waterloo, it was at the very least a warning of trouble ahead. Explaining his decision, Ladenis suggested that Michelin had fallen out of step with what diners wanted. “I have now reached the age of sixty-five and like an old elephant with its nose in the air, my sense of smell tells me that fashion, people, expectations, and restaurants are undergoing convulsive changes,” he said. In his view, traditional three-star dining had become passé, and so had Michelin. “Restaurant prices are simply too high,” Ladenis said. “I wish to remedy this, and to exit Michelin was my only way out.” Michelin, clearly stung, responded by insisting that chefs could not actually give back their stars; only the Guide itself had the power to withdraw them. But the legalistic face-saving did nothing to change the story line.
A three-star rating had always been considered tantamount to a winning lottery ticket, but it was now increasingly seen as both a creative and financial burden. In 1996, three years before Ladenis and White told the Guide to go jump in the Thames, Pierre Gagnaire’s three-star restaurant in Saint-Étienne went bankrupt, a first in the annals of Michelin. For Gagnaire, the problem was location: The restaurant was situated in an industrial city that didn’t attract many tourists and where the locals didn’t much appreciate his eclectic cooking—or the exorbitant prices. As far as Saint-Étienne’s mayor was concerned, it was good riddance: He said there was no place for a restaurant charging hundreds of dollars per head in a city in which people “cannot find [money] for their children’s school lunches.” Gagnaire’s demise might have been dismissed as a product of uniquely bad circumstances had it not been for the financial woes that struck another three-star chef, Marc Veyrat, that same year. Nine million dollars in debt after extensive renovations (including gold-plated bathroom fixtures), Veyrat was forced to close his restaurant for a month when he couldn’t repay the loans. The banks gave him a reprieve that allowed the restaurant, located in the Alps, to reopen, but Veyrat’s near-death experience underscored the point: Outside of Paris, at least, a three-star rating had become as much a millstone as a money spinner.
That was certainly true for Bernard Loiseau, and when he committed suicide in 2003, even chefs who had profited mightily from those little stars turned on Michelin, which they accused of demanding too much ostentation and of putting unbearable pressure on them. Paul Bocuse, who had arguably prospered more than any chef in history from his three-star rating, sounded a mutinous note, warning in the d
ays after Loiseau’s death that “the profession is going to react.”
It did eventually react, but not before Michelin inflicted several wounds on itself. A year after Loiseau’s death, a former inspector, Pascal Remy, violated Michelin’s Omertà and published a tell-all book, L’inspecteur se met à table (“The Inspector Sits Down to Eat”), based on the secret diary he had kept during his sixteen years with the company. Remy claimed that Michelin had just five inspectors for all of France, many fewer than was assumed. Puncturing another myth, Remy said that lots of restaurants were not visited annually; indeed, several years sometimes passed between reviews. He also asserted that some three-star establishments were considered untouchables and were sliding by on their reputations and that chefs were able to beg and cajole their way to higher ratings.
Michelin’s reputation suffered another blow the following year when it was forced to pulp copies of its 2005 Guide for the Benelux countries because it included a restaurant in Belgium that hadn’t yet opened. The restaurant’s owner told reporters that his establishment had been given an entry because of his “good relations” with Michelin and that the premature listing was the result of an “agreement” that he had reached with the Guide. Surveying all this damage, the great chef Joël Robuchon delivered a quietly stinging rebuke. “Today, after all these mix-ups, it saddens me that we are beginning to question the impartiality of [Michelin’s] judgment,” he told a French television audience. “I hope that Michelin will get back on its feet. It was brilliantly led in the past.”
It was another heavyweight French chef, Alain Senderens, who administered the coup de grâce: In May 2005, he announced that he was handing back his three stars, which he’d held for twenty-eight years, and converting Lucas Carton, his restaurant on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, into an upscale brasserie. Although he insisted that his decision was not an indictment of Michelin, he said the cost of maintaining a three-star rating had become too burdensome, a comment that certainly had the ring of an indictment. He repeated those sentiments when I had lunch with him a year later. Echoing Nico Ladenis, the sixty-seven-year-old Senderens said that haute cuisine had entered “a new age” in which diners wanted good food for less money and chefs wanted to serve impeccable fare without having to also provide lots of bells and whistles. But didn’t Michelin insist that stars were based purely on the quality of the cooking? Senderens smiled. “They like luxurious restaurants,” he diplomatically replied. But to continue catering to Michelin’s predilections no longer made sense financially or strategically. “I was spending hundreds of thousands of euros a year on the dining room—on flowers, on glasses,” he said. “But it didn’t make the food taste any better.” It sounded like the epitaph for an era.
The Michelin era had begun in 1900, with the publication of the inaugural Guide. Its first editor was André Michelin, who with his brother Édouard had founded the tire company in 1888. After his death in 1931, he was succeeded by a nephew, Pierre Bourdon-Michelin, who oversaw the Guide through the Second World War. Thereafter, a trio of outsiders—René Pauchet, André Tichot, and Bernard Naegellen, the last two former inspectors—held the job. Naegellen, who served as director from 1985 until 2000, was the embodiment of the Michelin Man—charmingly evasive, wearing his authority lightly but wielding it unsparingly. When Naegellen retired, Michelin shocked the culinary establishment by appointing a British inspector, Derek Brown, to succeed him. “It’s a scandal,” Paris-based restaurant critic Gilles Pudlowski told the Times of London. “England is the European country where you eat least well. An Englishman will bring nothing good.”
On that last score, at least, Pudlowski was prescient; little good did come from Brown’s editorship, though how much of the blame should fall on him is debatable. The low point of his tenure was Loiseau’s suicide. Brown naturally sought to absolve Michelin of any culpability and denied ever having warned the late chef that his third star was at risk. But for good measure, he opted to break with precedent and not strip La Côte d’Or of its third star, as had been brusquely done to Restaurant Alain Chapel after its namesake passed away. The Remy tell-all also appeared on Brown’s watch, and by the time the Briton stepped down in the summer of 2004, having reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty, Michelin’s brand looked to be in serious trouble.
Michelin decided to shake things up by appointing an outsider, Jean-Luc Naret, to succeed Brown. Naret, a forty-three-year-old Frenchman, was a hotel industry veteran with no prior Michelin experience and no particular gastronomic credentials. But the company now wanted a charismatic front man who could help restore the Guide’s reputation, and the youthful and urbane (not to mention perpetually tanned) Naret fit that description. Michelin also needed someone who could smooth the Guide’s passage into new markets. In early 2005, the company announced plans to venture beyond Europe for the first time by publishing a Guide to New York. There, it would be going up against the very popular and democratic Zagat guide in a city accustomed to detailed, transparent restaurant criticism. To win over American diners, Michelin would have to be far more communicative than it had been back home, and it was with this, too, in mind that Naret had been hired.
The New York Guide was published in the fall of 2005, and the reaction was a collective yawn: The three-star picks (Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Per Se, and Alain Ducasse New York) didn’t cause much controversy, and while there was considerable quibbling over the one- and two-star choices, most food-savvy New Yorkers seemed proudly indifferent to Michelin’s arrival. Undeterred, Michelin hailed its American debut as a success and not long thereafter unveiled plans to publish Guides to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. And in early 2007, Naret announced that Michelin would be coming out that year with a Guide for Tokyo. Haute cuisine was now a global phenomenon, and Michelin intended to be the universal arbiter.
All of this made Naret a busy man. After several months of trying, I finally managed to catch up with him in New York in July 2007. We met for a drink at the boutique Midtown hotel where he was staying. The bar area was filled with what the locals tended to refer to as Eurotrash, and Naret, who had just flown in and would soon be leaving for San Diego and Tokyo, seemed very much at home. He was wearing a stylish dark blue suit, a white dress shirt (sans cravate) with a flamboyantly large collar, and a white pocket square. He suggested that we take a seat in the small lobby so that we could “watch all the very nice women coming and going.” Naret had his usual George Hamilton tan, and I joked about airplanes now coming equipped with sunning salons, which elicited a wan smile from him.
He suggested we drink beer; I ordered a Belgian lager, and he went with a Heineken. Naret confirmed that he had indeed been hired to bring greater transparency to the Guide’s operations and to lead its expansion. “We need to protect the anonymity of the inspectors, but we also need to explain what we are looking for,” he said. “Michelin had never communicated its values. We shouldn’t be afraid to go in front of the public. I’ve done twelve hundred interviews with journalists around the world, and I always say they are welcome to ask any question.” I took that as an invitation and asked him how many inspectors Michelin currently employed in France. “About fifteen,” he said. Okay; maybe glasnost really had come to the Avenue de Breteuil. Naret went on to tell me that he dined in multiple restaurants himself each week but was not an inspector and did not personally decide on the allocation of stars. And how often were the three-star establishments visited? He said it was six to twelve times a year for three-stars and four to six times for two-stars. When I pointed out that a lot of people were under the impression that the difference between a three-star and two-star was mainly a function of the décor, Naret smiled and shook his head. “What matters is what’s on the plate,” he said. But Alain Senderens, who knew something about winning three stars, had said that the sumptuousness of the setting mattered, and ever since Bocuse renovated his bathrooms, chefs had believed this to be the case. “Everyone always brings up the loo,” Naret said, laug
hing. “We never tell chefs that they have to invest in all these other things.” So for forty years, the great chefs of France had been laboring under an enormous misconception and spending millions of dollars they didn’t need to spend? “Yes.”
By now, we were on to a second round of beers, and I’d come to like Naret. He seemed like an oily character, and I found much of what he said unconvincing, but he was very friendly and forthcoming. The conversation had turned to specific chefs, and whether it was the Heineken talking or the new voice of the Michelin Guide, Naret was remarkably candid. I mentioned a recent visit to Georges Blanc and how empty the dining room had been; Naret told me the Guide had lately received a slew of reader letters regarding Blanc. As he said it, he arched his eyebrow as if to indicate that the mail was not running in Blanc’s favor and that his third star might be at risk. Talking about Ferran Adrià’s influence, I brought up a meal I’d had a few weeks earlier at the two-star Cordeillan-Bages in Bordeaux, whose chef, Thierry Marx, was keen on Adrià-like foams and flourishes. I told Naret that I found Marx’s food disappointing—the kitchen seemed too focused on pyrotechnics and not sufficiently attentive to basics. The lamb I’d had was overcooked and tasteless. He nodded in emphatic agreement, said he’d had a similar experience, and confided that the bullet-headed Marx, once touted as a sure bet for three stars, would now probably never get promoted. I asked if he really thought that the food at Bocuse still merited a third star. “Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not, but overall, as an experience, he maintains his level.” Not exactly a resounding endorsement. I also broached another sensitive subject: Why, I wondered, hadn’t La Côte d’Or been demoted to two stars following Loiseau’s death, as had been the case with Alain Chapel’s restaurant? Bernard Naegellen had explained, in regard to Chapel, that to leave the third star in place would have suggested that the deceased chef had had nothing to do with his restaurant’s success. Naret, completely contradicting his predecessor, said that “stars are not as attached to the man; they are attached to the team of the restaurant, and if they continue to do the same job, there is no point to take stars away.” In Michelin’s judgment, La Côte d’Or had not faltered in the wake of Loiseau’s suicide and therefore it had kept its third star. Four years later, it still had it.
Au Revoir to All That Page 9