Let’s be clear, all restaurant guides make mistakes. (Harden’s is absolutely no exception.) But sometimes, you see facts published which are so gob-smackingly ignorant that they call basic process into question. And never more so when the guide is the all-seeing, all-knowing, and ever more self-regarding Michelin.
So we were particularly struck by an entry in the much-ballyhooed Michelin UK, published yesterday, which refers to a restaurant called Ribbands at 147-149 Notting Hill Gate W11.
The restaurant closed last summer. (We didn't list it in Harden’s 2008 – which went to press almost six months ago – for the simple reason it wasn’t there any more.) Here’s a picture of the site as the Mexican bar restaurant as which the site has traded since at least last September.
The foodie media, as is becoming a ritual, are full of speculation as to why X or Y did or didn’t get that precious first/second/third star, but no one ever seems to consider the explanation for which there is at least some hard evidence: that, at the most basic factual level, Michelin simply doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.
PS (5 February) Always nice to know we have friends in high places, so we were interested to read Restaurant magazine’s ‘take’ on this news item, or – as the magazine would have it – this “desperate and typo-heavy rant”.
We’ve corrected the two typos – apologies – but what’s most striking is that the magazine finds our typos so much more interesting than Michelin’s demonstrable ignorance of what’s going on in far-off W11. As we’ve noted before, what makes the “well-regarded guide” – that’s Michelin – so interesting is that support for it is essentially a leap of faith. Restaurant magazine clearly feels that facts tending to undermine that faith must, by definition, be unworthy of repetition.
(On typos, incidentally, anyone know what Michelin actually meant in the Gordon Ramsay (RHR) entry when they wrote: "ist best tables by the window”? Glad to know we’re not the only people with the occasional proofing problem!)
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