The scream heard echoing across New York’s Central Park last Tuesday morning could easily have been mistaken for something sinister, even according to the man responsible.
”I really was quite loud,” says Eric Ripert, chef at the city’s highly regarded Le Bernardin restaurant. Ripert, who was out running, had just taken a call on his cellphone telling him he had won arguably the greatest honour possible for a chef. The revered Michelin Guide had arrived in New York and awarded Le Bernardin the maximum three stars.
For London’s leading chefs, the news was startling. Six months ago Gourmet magazine, the bible for American foodies, had declared London the most exciting restaurant city on the planet. Now, as Jean-Luc Naret, the head of Michelin, personally gave New York’s newly starred chefs the good news, it became clear that there had been a major realignment at the top of the international restaurant league table. London has just one three-starred establishment: Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea. By the time lunch service began, New York had four, placing it second only to Paris. It also garnered more one-stars than London.
Ramsay, who is to open his own venture in Manhattan next year, was quick to offer a back-handed compliment. ”New York has always been a massive inspiration to me,” he told The Observer. ”And it’s no secret that much of the talent there is European. I just can’t wait to join in.”
But beyond the transatlantic rivalries lies the story of Michelin’s efforts to reinvigorate itself. The tyre-maker began handing out free restaurant guides to French drivers at the turn of the last century, but in the past few years a series of embarrassments and crises has challenged its authority as the arbiter of gastronomic greatness.
Two years ago French chefs muttered that the pressure of maintaining the highest award had been partly responsible for the suicide of the three-star chef Bernard Loiseau. Last year a former inspector claimed many multi-starred restaurants in the red guides were not visited from one year to the next, due to lack of staff, and that some of the biggest names did not deserve their awards. Then this year the guide to the Benelux countries had to be withdrawn because it included a glowing review of a restaurant that had not even opened.
At the heart of the problem was an apparent inability on the part of the organisation to adapt to a changing world, in which reader-led guides such as Zagats and Hardens are introducing a much-needed element of democracy to restaurant reviews. Online foodie sites allow anyone with an internet connection to offer their opinion of the newest places within hours of their opening.
Michelin has always refused to explain why it bestows its awards and, until very recently, would offer nothing more in its guides than a list of the dishes available at the restaurants it chose to include. It was regularly criticised for failing to engage with non-Western cuisines and for only giving its top award to French restaurants. In short, it was in trouble.
So the decision, announced earlier this year, to take on New York — the first stage of a promised expansion into the US and then across Asia — looked brave. Usually Michelin announces its verdict on restaurants by issuing a press release. Last week, to launch the first New York guide, it threw a glitzy party for hundreds of people at the Guggenheim museum on the city’s smart Upper East Side. The crowds queued around the block to get in, including the French Minister of Culture, the former supermodel Helena Christiansen, and three-star chefs from across Europe, among them Paul Bocuse, Ferran Adria and, from Britain, Michel Roux.
Introducing the guide, Naret announced that Michelin had come to the city ”with much humility and,” he added, demonstrating that humility, ”105 years of experience”.
The guide itself is also a departure: gone are the hieroglyphics only a cryptographer could decode and the sparse descriptions. In come photographs, gushing prose and even recipes — 507 restaurants out of roughly 23 000 in the city’s five boroughs are included; and just 39 of them have stars.
The response to all of these innovations was lukewarm. The New York Post made much of the fact that all four of the restaurants to receive the top score served French food and that only one of the chefs — Thomas Keller of Per Se — wasn’t born in France. The New York Sun headlined its editorial ”Go Back to France” and took Naret to task for suggesting that New York is a city ”on a par” with the world’s best.
”New Yorkers know that our city isn’t ‘on par’ with those cities,” the Sun said. ”It’s better.”
Part of Michelin‘s problem is that here it is Zagats which is king. The pocket-sized guide sells 650 000 copies a year and more than 30 000 of the city’s inhabitants contribute to its detailed scoring system. Its founder, former lawyer Tim Zagat, said: ”I think Michelin turned out to be incredibly predictable by going all French in this very diverse city — and I’m a francophile.”
As he pointed out, only one non-French restaurant had received more than a single star, the nose-bleedingly expensive sushi restaurant Masa (where food costs a set $350 a head, before drinks, tip or service), which got two stars. ”And Japanese is a very important cuisine in this city.”
There were questions also over those top awards. One set of three stars went to the restaurant of Alain Ducasse, the revered French chef who already has an unprecedented two restaurants with three stars in France. And yet he changed the head chef at his New York restaurant only a few months ago. Usually Michelin waits a year before awarding three stars to a new chef, and the decision to do so here was seen as nothing more than a coronation. Or as the restaurant critic of the New York Post put it: ”Explanation: Michelin is genetically incapable of giving Ducasse less than three stars.”
Then there was the issue of the 31 restaurants which got a single star. As Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for the New York Times, says: ”They were predictable at the top end and confusing at the bottom.”
The inclusion of Peter Luger, the quintessential Brooklyn steak house, was taken as a sign that the French were trying to engage with American culture. But the listing of a rough and ready pastiche of a British gastro pub called the Spotted Pig, the perfect place for a well-made burger with shoestring potatoes, was a cause for raised eyebrows. It is co-owned by celebrity chef Mario Batali, a kind of New York Italian version of Gordon Ramsay, who has interests in eight restaurants across the city. ”I love the Spotted Pig,” he said over a plate of marinated artichokes and some rock shrimp at his pizzeria Otto. ”But a Michelin starred restaurant? Get outta here.” The problem, Batali said, was that Michelin didn’t get New York, because of who the inspectors were.
Although Michelin hasn’t identified them, it has said that five were French and only two of them American. In the closing stages a dozen more were shipped in from Europe.
Naret was unrepentant: ”We’re not here to please New Yorkers. We’re here to inspect restaurants. We’re doing the book to please our readers, not the chefs.
”And we’re not French. We’re an international company rating international restaurants.” Plus, he said, most of the French-born chefs who had received top awards had been in America for 20 years or more. ”Surely they are allowed to be thought of as American now?”
The only places in New York where the guide’s reception was universally positive were the restaurants that received top scores. Thomas Keller sat in the sleek dining room of Per Se, his restaurant with its views over Central Park where the menu costs $175 a head, and admitted it hadn’t sunk in yet. ”It’s the most extraordinary thing. It’s a great honour.”
Keller, who trained in some of the great French three-star restaurants, had little time for complaints about the dominance of French food. ”French cuisine has always been considered the haute cuisine of the world,” he said, with an impressively Gallic shrug for an all-American boy. ”It’s in the DNA. Some people want to criticise that and I don’t know why. It has given us all so much pleasure.”
Michelin has committed itself to New York for at least 10 years, and when it publishes the next guide it won’t merely be awarding stars. It will also be taking them away. And then the real bitching will begin. Because if there’s one thing New York has an appetite for, it’s a really good argument. – Guardian Unlimited Â