"Everybody believed in the Guide Michelin. Here conversation went crescendo: where one ate and what one ate and the way it was cooked and where one might eat next Sunday; poetry welled up in every heart – Vaux le detour…Vaux le voyage…One hour twenty-five from door to door, I swear to you, and not a minute more.. "
Sybille Bedford in Jigsaw(1989) on the pleasures of the South of France in the Twenties
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| 50 Best in Guildhall |
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| warehouse by the sea |
An impossibility, say the sceptics – how can you compare an establishment in a centuries old warehouse on the Baltic Sea against a place in an abandoned biscuit factory in Africa?
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| Luke Dale-Roberts in his converted biscuit factory in Cape Town |
Well, nearly a thousand people have done just that – and judged Noma in Copenhagen to be the World’s Best restaurant, while the Test Kitchen in Cape Town made it onto the list for the first time.
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| Rene as Number One in 2011 with friends - spot the other chefs behind him |
In little more than a decade, the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards have become the closest thing there is to the Culinary Oscars. The awards ceremony, attended by hundreds of the worlds leading chef and food critics at London’s Guildhall, was streamed and tweeted around the globe, while the chefs themselves partied till dawn at Shoreditch’s Clove Club.
The list, compiled by nearly a thousand of the industry’s food critics and chefs, has achieved international fame for many of the participants, while others question the validity of such an enterprise. When René Redzepi returned to Noma after winning the award in 2010, he found several thousand emails demanding a table and has been full ever since.
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| Red Guide to France - one of many Michelins |
The untold story is the growing rift between many leading French chefs and the 50 Best, fuelled perhaps by the fact that there has never been a French chef at Number one. Instead, chefs from the US, UK, Spain and Denmark have made it to the top. This has led to what is perceived as a boycott of the awards by a number of the most illustrious French chefs, such as Alain Ducasse, Joel Robuchon, Alain Passard and Guy Savoy. Last year, Robuchon and Ducasse were in London at the time of the ceremony, but neither deigned to attend, even though Ducasse was actually given the 50 Best Life Time Achievement Award. There are also mutterings about top French chefs declining to stock San Pellegrino mineral water, in protest.
But perhaps the biggest losers in France are the Michelin Guides, who have for more than a century have been the arbiters of haute cuisine, with their Star System and ratings done by a team of highly experienced anonymous inspectors. Gaining that Third Michelin Star (“worth a journey”) has been the goal of thousands of chefs, but at present, there are only 110 restaurants that can claim this honour.
Until recently, Michelin inspectors never broke cover, but now, perhaps because of their concern at the way the World’s 50 Best Awards encroaching on their territory, they have even started appearing on French TV food shows, though discreetly silhouetted so as to avoid identification. However, this has unleashed considerable criticism in France for the trivialisation of the most august culinary reference point.
On a personal level, I still adore the Michelin Red Guide to France. Some of the most pleasurable moments of my life have been when driving through some unknown portion of France with my family around 10am, with no idea of where we might end up stopping for lunch. Then the game begins, with everyone scrambling for the Red Guide to see where we might conceivably stop, though in our case we invariably have Gault Millhau and Pudo’s too, just to compare and contrast and provoke heated rows of where would be the best place to stop. This year, the Red Guide to France arrived with 100 pages missing, including the entry for Lyon and quite a lot of other cities and towns beginning with L or M. A week later, another copy arrived with the missing pages restored – a costly error indeed.
Michael Ellis, the American-born international director of the Michelin Guides, told me that they have nothing to worry about: “We don’t see the World’s 50 Best as doing anything new that we haven’t identified already - when you look at their list, all of these restaurants are already in Michelin guides, except in countries we don’t cover.” He added, “We don’t do lists or have a quota for how many three star restaurants there should be – it is based purely on objective criteria about what is on the plate.”
However, Michelin’s international branding power in the food sector is obviously waning. Some of the most trenchant criticism has come from Jean-Luc Naret, who headed it for seven years before Mr Ellis arrived from having run the motorcycle tyre division of Michelin.
“There is a huge gap at the top of the market and the 50 Best are taking advantage of it, because they know what they are doing. I drew up a global chart with new destinations, but nothing has been done since I left in 2010 and every year we hear and less about the launch of the Michelin guides. Michelin does not treat chefs the way they should be treated – they should hold a gathering of the leading European chefs – the chef need to be recognised and I think 50 Best are doing a god job on that, even though the Michelin selection process is more rigorous.
I am sure the 50 Best will continue to have a huge impact because everybody is happy to be rated and 50 Best have a beautiful party for all of the chefs in London!”
Michelin has announced that they will finally bring out a new regional guide to Scandinavia next year, as at present they only cover the five major Scandinavian cities. However, the World’s 50 Best awarded Copenhagen’s Noma the top slot in 2010 for three years and has regained it again this year, but it has never held more than two Michelin stars. When it comes to the region as a whole, it looks like Michelin are playing catch up.
While Michelin are losing out on the publicity stakes, their publications also taking a big hit. Michelin refuses to release sales figures of their guides, but publishing sources say sales of their flagship France Guide are now less than 100,000, from around half a million in 2000, while the UK Guide sales are somewhere below 7,000.
Brett Woltenscroft, the manager and co-founder of Daunt Books, Britain’s leading travel bookshop, confirmed that Michelin sales are less than an eighth of what they were 20 years ago. “When the UK or French Red Guide came out a few years ago, it was a major publishing event but now, what with the emergence of the Internet and other guides like Time Out, Zagat and Hardens, it is far less important. Since the release of the Michelin Red Guide to Paris last month, we have only sold one copy.”
Michelin counter this by saying they have expanded their online presence, so they now get two million hits per month while their inspectors in France and some elsewhere have begun using Twitter. A recent book on the fine dining world estimated that the Michelin food guide division loses around €15 million annually, which hardly matters as the company is wholly owned by the Michelin tyre company, which posts annual profits in excess of €1 billion. One Michelin official explained to me that the importance of the Michelin publishing division, which includes its peerless maps and general guide books, is that while it is less than 1% of the entire Michelin turnover, it generates more than half of all publicity for the Michelin brand.
The World’s 50 Best Awards are owned by William Reed Business Media, publishers of trade publications such as Restaurant magazine. San Pellegrino has no say in the actual awards; they are merely the largest of several international sponsors. William Drew, who is in charge of the awards, says “We have always been very clear that we are not in competition with Michelin – we only cover 50 places, which is of course a miniscule elite of gastronomy across the world compared to their thousands of entries, but we see no reason why we can’t exist in perfect harmony side by side - we are just a snapshot of opinion at the top of the profession.”
However, they have successfully expanded the 50 Best Awards into Asia and Latin America in the past year. Drew concedes they are also thinking of other ways to “enter closer into the territory Michelin is in, but we are not about selling guide books – we are a sponsorship model. One of the attractions of 50 Best is its global nature – no other company covers it in the same way. One of our other big advantages is that we come from an industry background and the chefs like the fact that chefs and other industry people are voting for them – that is why they come to the event. One of the problems we have had is the rumour that you had to stock San Pellegrino in order to qualify for inclusion, which is of course, bollocks.”
Even some of the more knowledgeable food critics are starting to criticise the inconsistent standards amongst some of the recent awards of Three Michelin stars. Andy Hayler, the food blogger who has eaten at virtually every one of the three star Michelin restaurant on the planet, is particularly scathing about the recent Hong Kong and New York guides, which he says in general should be dropped by one or even two stars to compare them with France or Germany. “L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Hong Kong has also been given three stars for what is essentially a chain restaurant, not nearly as good as the two star version in Paris. Michelin have just awarded three stars to an Italian restaurant (81/2 Otto et Mezzo –Bombana) in Hong Kong that would arguably be a one star restaurant in Italy – the ratings there are completely bonkers.”
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| www.andyhayler.com |
But even in Europe, there are critical comments from Hayler: “A number of these new Three Stars are really two star level at best – La Vague d’Or in St Tropez, De Leest in Holland plus Reale and Piazza Duomo in Italy – just about every one of my foodie friends is baffled about some of these recent promotions. It used to be a Gold Standard, with the odd famous French chef they wouldn’t demote, but it’s not like that any more – it is very frustrating.” Andy is quite critical of Michelin in the UK too: “I really don’t think there should be any three stars in Britain other than The Fat Duck– twice I have had to send dishes back at the Waterside Inn, which should never happen at a 3 star restaurant. Fat Duck is justified as a 3 star but the menu there barely changes, with no seasonality. Frankly, the UK scene is not that good. If you go to any of the top restaurants in Paris, they are streets ahead of anything in the UK –nothing in Britain is in that league.”
The other aberration with the two Japanese Michelin guides is that every restaurant listed has at least one Michelin star, the only country in the world to have such a profusion. The official line is that is because the quality is so high, but some people assume it is because of the loss of face involved if a restaurateur has no star. When Amex introduced the Green card into Japan several decades ago, they had to abolish it and introduce the Gold card as the entry level because cardholders were too embarrassed to use the lowest ranking card. The lack of Japanese entries in the Top 50 – only two this year – is a problem in the other direction, as Japanese cuisine obviously deserves far more coverage internationally than that.
That is not to say that there is isn’t critical comment about the World’s 50 Best, with the most common complaint being that they favour the trendy and innovative over the more traditional establishments. Andy Hayler thinks “the big problem with San Pellegrino is that it is open to manipulation by PR companies given the lack of auditability of whether voting panelists actually pay bills - if you look at the list, there are some clear absurdities – is Chateaubriand in Paris, really the best restaurant in France, above the likes of Ledoyen or Ambroisie?. And as for Dinner by Heston, which is a large-scale restaurant, it is rated more than 40 places above Fat Duck, which is absurd. It is not a list I can take very seriously – it is also incredibly biased towards Modernism, with many superb classical restaurants omitted entirely. To me it seems a list of the most fashionable restaurants, not necessarily the best”.
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| Inaki's wild duck dish served at Poland's 2012 Cook It Raw - they dangled over an open fire and were amazing |
In the 2011 awards, Chateaubriand was the only French restaurant in the top 10, even though it never even had a single Michelin star. Inaki Aizpitarte is a very cool Basque born chef, who is famous for running a stylish neo-bistrot with very reasonable prices. I have never been there myself, as he is one of the most passionate believers in natural “wine”, to the exclusion of all other wines. However, he is certainly a talented chef as I have eaten his food elsewhere but this high award rankles the French food establishment. As Jean-Luc Naret says, “When you have a restaurant judged to be the top in France when it hasn’t even got a star, it really puts into question the whole valuation of the judges.”
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| simple perfection of Hedone |
“Basically it is very simple – if you are on a list of the top 100 restaurants in the world and there are only four from Britain on that list, you are going to get a lot of impact. All of a sudden you are benchmarked against the 100 best restaurants in the world, which had an enormous effect on our summer business. We have had some high spenders before but we had more overall impact in terms of people who have a deeper interest in gastronomy and wine than perhaps before.”
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| Aged steak at Hedone |
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| Andrea (r) looks on while Massimo Bottura addresses the Gelinaz! event in Lima, September 2013 |
Andrea Petrini, the well-known food journalist, is the chairman of the French judging panel of the 50 Best - and also founder of Gelinaz! a new concept in food events. He thinks such criticism is not justified: “Of course San Pellegrino focuses on what is new and innovative because these are the chefs people are talking about, so naturally they gain more votes than places that have been highly regarded for years.” Andrea prefers the approach of the World’s 50 Best: “My personal opinion is that since San Pellegrino is not a meritocratic guide, but a list with all different kinds of cuisine are united – it is much wider in its scope - it is much more human – people from France, Spain, the States, Latin America and Japan – you have the impression that you are part of a global thing, though at the same time It is more like a family thing – chefs are coming to this from the other side of the planet just to spend time with their peers and colleagues like they were attending a party for all people from all cuisines - it is a much more inclusive system than if you had a gathering of three star chefs.”
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| Andrea in his Central Asian Camel saddlebag carpet suit |
There is a place for everyone – would I still use Michelin or Gault Millau or the Good Food Guide for example… if I was going on holiday in Britain today, would I put the Good Food Guide into my glove box? Twenty years ago, I would have done so but not now. I have never been a big fan of Michelin - Gault Millau in Paris used to get all of the next generation of chefs 10 years ahead of Michelin. The new culinary trend is something more nature-oriented, less grand and more personal with stronger connections to the soil and regional produce. No one wants to go to gastronomic temples any more – now it is much more relaxed.”
How much longer can annual guides function? Things can change dramatically in the space of a year, but when you have a fixed reference point like an annual publication, it is bound to miss out on what has happened in the months before and after publication. For me, this is where the net and social media plays a huge part.
Professor Christel Lane, a fellow of St John’s College Cambridge, has just published a fascinating book (The Cultivation of Taste – chefs and the organisation of fine dining, OUP) looking in detail at haute cuisine dining: “I think Michelin and San Pellegrino are both trying to do different things. If your criteria is innovation, the 50 Best is perfectly logical but if you are looking for consistency, then it is not valid. I think the appreciation of Michelin amongst diners is varied now. They have been slow with everything and they only go into a country if there is a critical mass. However, they are very strong on consistency. Nevertheless, the 50 Best rating system is taking away influence from Michelin and there will be less people waiting for their opinion. After all, it is a very good sound bite to say ‘This is one of the 50 best restaurants in the world.’ ”
There are other international guides that offer a huge amount of useful information on where to eat.. the first is the In World Guide, which is run on a shoestring out of Munich by Peter Finkbeiner, perhaps the last of the old style sybarites. It costs €125 but has more inside knowledge of where the very rich and fashionable like to indulge themselves than any other guide on the market. It details where to stay, shop and eat in 40 of the leading cities in the world (though not Florence or Venice, which is a shame)
Where Chefs Eat was put together by Joe Warwick, the actual founder of the World’s 50 Best, when he edited Restaurant Magazine more than a decade ago. Hugely useful.
Relais et Chateaux still offers the best single volume directory of high end hotels and restaurants internationally, though obviously there are large numbers that don’t appear because they are either from a different group or don’t chose to pay the large annual fee to be part of the family.
