Michelin’s UK results for 2010 having begun to leak, they were made available to selected journalists at 3pm today, and can be seen in full here.
Once again, Michelin reveals its desperate love affair with celebrity, and particularly with heaping further stars on chefs who are already famous… for having lots of Michelin stars!
The absurdity of this is revealed not only for the pre-trailed third star for Alain Ducasse (the world’s second most starred chef, and a Frenchman too) at the Dorchester, but also by the first star for Apsleys at the Lanesborough.
Harden’s survey – whose results at the very top end of the market usually align very closely with those of Michelin, except when it comes to celebrities – has consistently found Ducasse’s cooking to be thoroughly unremarkable (in the bottom half of restaurants in its price bracket), yet the restaurant is promoted to Michelin’s very highest level.
Apsleys – the new London outpost of Heinz Beck, a three star chef from Rome – has been panned not only in the our survey, but also by almost every major critic in London, often in scathing terms.
In both cases, the suspicion that the chefs concerned have been over-rated by Michelin simply because they already have multiple stars elsewhere in inescapable.
What is the point of a guide that comes to conclusions that – in defiance of the views of both regular diners-out and almost all professional critics – seem simply designed to heap further celebrity on chefs who already have it?
Not all the news for celebs was good though. Michelin did summon up the ‘courage’ to strip Gordon Ramsay of his star at Claridge’s.
Well, perhaps they didn’t really need much courage to take a gentle pop at Ramsay, who still, in aggregate, seems to benefit hugely from the love of celebrity which permeates Michelin’s results. Ramsay still has plenty of stars left, and the goings (and comings) of stars for him will still be able to generate Michelin name checks in the media, throughout the world, for many years to come.
PS (18 January) Trade publication Caterer & Hotelkeeper put our criticisms to Derek Bulmer, Editor of the UK Michelin, and his response is worth recording in full, mainly for its sheer vacuity.
“These are multi-starred chefs in their own country and we cannot ignore them,” he said. This very sentence was also used in its entirety last year, so he must be proud of it. It’s very difficult to see that it means anything at all, as no one has ever suggested they should be ignored.
“Because we have the benefit of knowing their restaurants across the world, we are able to assess them quite quickly.” Again, what does this mean? Michelin is supposed to work on inspections. How can you inspect a restaurant from a known chef more quickly than one of an unknown chef? If what he says does mean anything, Mr Bulmer seems to be coming pretty close to saying that known chefs get an easier ride.
“That said, if you look at the list of this year’s stars, apart from Ducasse, it’s hardly dominated by celebrities.” Perhaps Mr Bulmer should have been a politician: no one has ever suggested that the list is dominated by celebrities – how could it be when they are relatively few in number? The charge is that those few celebrities get an unreasonably easy ride.
PS (11 February) We have been alerted to the fact that the history of Michelin praising restaurants on the basis of hopes and expectations rather than reality goes back a very long way.
In 1984, Michelin awarded ** to the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons before the restaurant had even opened (Oxford Mail). Just over a decade later saw the famous Benelux incident, in which Michelin had to pulp an entire edition because they were caught out having pulled the same trick again (Times).
PS (5 September 2011) And another one. The NY Michelin Twitter feed claims to have been to a restaurant during a period it was closed. (Grub Street New York)
Michelin’s explanation that the feed had been 'delayed' to preserve inspector anonymity is very difficult to credit. Le Bernardin is a restaurant with a worldwide reputation, and its closure was apparently well known in New York. So Michelin is effectively saying that its operative are not dishonest, just really ignorant of the subject they’re supposed to be world’s leading experts in. Can they really be that ignorant?
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