Well, it’s official. Gordon Ramsay’s new outfit in Versailles storms into the ratings of the world’s most influential restaurant rating guide, the ‘Guide Rouge’ (now it its 100th edition), with almost the very highest rating – two stars.
The fact that Michelin is the world’s most influential restaurant guide, of course, doesn’t mean that they necessarily have the vaguest idea what real customers actually want. This is especially so in the case of celebrity chefs, where Michelin ever more gives the impression of being blinded by the stars of its own creation.
If fact, so perverse are some of Michelin’s star-struck awards that they are instantly revealed by the market to be the flim-flam they are. The 2008 UK Michelin, for example, re-awarded its star to Ramsay’s La Noisette (as well as a very rare four knife-and-fork comfort rating) pretty much coincidentally with that Knightsbridge restaurant’s ignominious closure after just 18 months in business. And the 2009 UK Michelin went to press with one of the 40-odd London’s ‘bibs gourmands’ awarded to Ramsay’s Foxtrot Oscar, which almost all local commentators had agreed was a disaster. By the time the guide actually hit the streets, the Chelsea bistro had been reduced to something like half-time operation.
Let’s hope the giddy (and controversial) elevation of Ramsay’s French joint doesn’t quickly ‘do for it’!
PS (3 March) Among all the myriad articles ‘celebrating‘ the launch of the hundredth French Michelin, the most perceptive we’ve seen is in the Financial Times.
Befitting a business publication, it cuts through the foodie brouhaha to note what’s really the only salient point about the guide:
“But all this sound and fury over whether or not a restaurant deserves a three-star rating is not really the point. For Michelin, the guidebooks business is not so much a profit centre or a vehicle for diversification as essentially a prime, original marketing tool. Every year Michelin sells some 1.2m guidebooks around the world. That is pretty impressive, but it still accounts for only about 0.5 per cent of the company’s annual sales. And the purpose of the guides is not primarily to help increase earnings. The aim is essentially to promote the Michelin brand and its core product: tyres.”
If commentators would bear this key point in mind, the answer to most of the ‘controversies’ about Michelin would quickly become clear.
Even the FT, though, has fallen into the classic trap which many other media do, of forgetting that 0.5% of the company’s sales accounted for by ‘guide books’ are not just the restaurant guides, but Michelin’s whole, considerable guide book publishing business.
If you assume, for ball park purposes, that Michelin is generating net revenue of 12 Euros at time for the 1.2m restaurant guides sold worldwide, that would equate to total restaurant guide revenue of 14.4m Euros, or less than 0.1 per cent of Michelin’s 17bn Euro+ turnover.
You can sort of see the attraction for them, can’t you?
PS (6 March) Today’s Times has an interview with Jean-Luc Naret, who runs Michelin’s publishing. That article confirms our point that it’s the whole publishing business which represents 0.5% of the company’s turnover, not just the restaurant guides.
The offline copy is illustrated by a timeline of a ‘bumpy guide for Michelin’. What it signally fails to include is the publication of ‘L’Inspecteur se met a table’, which confirmed – from the perspective of a former inspector – many of the criticisms made of Michelin (which are very fairly discussed in the article itself).
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