A Paris court on Tuesday ruled that the celebrated Michelin food guide was perfectly entitled to sack an inspector who wrote a bestselling book that questioned the credibility of its star rating system.
But the court regretted that it was not qualified to rule on Michelin’s complaint that L’Inspecteur Se Met àTable (The Inspector Sits Down to Eat), an appetising exercise in bean-spilling by Pascal Rémy, had ”denigrated” the august 104-year-old guide.
Rémy’s oeuvre, which sat high on non-fiction bestseller lists for months, makes the sacrilegious assertion that more than a third of France’s 27 finest three-star restaurants do not deserve the accolade.
The number of inspectors employed by the guide has fallen from 11 in 1988 to five this year, he writes, and they are paid the same as a primary school teacher to visit, between them, about 10 000 establishments a year.
In fact, inspectors for the Red Guide call on each restaurant at most once every three years, Rémy says.
Top chefs are so prestigious that their establishments are considered ”untouchable”, he claims, and clients’ comments and press reviews are used to decide which of the rest are worth actually visiting.
Michelin rejected the claims, saying 21 inspectors worked on the 2004 guide, the average period between visits was 18 months, and top establishments could be inspected a dozen times a year. Rémy, the company suggested, was ”fishing for a job as a food critic”.
The court ruled that when the Red Guide summarily sacked Rémy, a 16-year veteran of France’s gourmet eateries, after he first threatened to publish the book this spring, it was not guilty of wrongful dismissal.
Michelin’s lawyer, Georges Kiejman, said after Tuesday’s verdict that Rémy had ”succeeded in duping the journalists, but it’s more difficult to trick a tribunal”.
The company reserved the right to start separate legal proceedings for defamation, he said.
The court ordered Rémy to pay â,¬2 000 in costs. But it rejected Michelin’s demand that the inspector also pay â,¬100 000 in damages for the ”denigration” he had caused to the company’s name, saying such a ruling was not within its competence.
The inspector on Tuesday said he would appeal. – Guardian Unlimited Â