Can you still trust Michelin stars? by Aaron Harker


Posted 1 year ago


Can you still trust Michelin stars?

In 2016, the world famous Michelin guide made its first appearance in Seoul, South Korea. The new guide was lauded by both national and international outlets as an exciting new opportunity to highlight local cuisine, but the South Korean City got far more than it bargained for when it dropped that November. Seoul bloggers and Michelin followers were quick to criticize the guide’s list, with some accusing it of being corrupt.

But food obsessives weren’t the only ones who were fired up. In October 2017, Song Ki-seok, a local official from the National Assembly of Education, Culture, Sports, and Tourism Committee, publicly criticized the state-run Korean Tourism Organization for agreeing to pay Michelin approximately 2 billion won (roughly $1.8 million USD) to bring the Seoul guide to the country. The KTO’s initial payment of 100 million won went out in 2015. Over the next four years starting in 2016, according to the contract, roughly 400 million won a year would exchange hands to support the continued publishing of the guide. What the tourism board received for that hefty sum of public money was a Seoul guide riddled with errors.

The financial relationship between high-profile restaurant honors such as Michelin and local tourism boards is perhaps more common than people realize. Tourism Australia paid $600,000 to host the 2017 ceremony for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in Melbourne, Australia. Tourism boards in Louisiana and Chicago have used big money to lure Top Chef and the James Beard Awards to their cities. Michelin isn’t willing to address the financial relationships that are fueling its guides: their representatives were unresponsive to multiple requests for comment.

But the company has been candid about its monetary relationships with tourism boards and government entities in the past. “Some countries and some governments that want to attract tourism, they are very interested in having a guide, and so they sponsor a guide to have the ability to communicate around their gastronomic landscape,” Claire Dorland Clauzel, former executive vice president for Michelin guides, told the Washington Post in 2017. Since 2016, the company has launched guides in Washington D.C., Singapore, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, Phuket, and Phang Nga, Thailand.

Unlike the handful of new guides rolling out in Asia, no U.S. cities have ever paid a “commission” to Michelin, according to the report. And Dorland Clauzel notes that not all cities are considered Michelin material. “You have to have first the right gastronomic landscape,” with lots of restaurants to choose from, she said.

Historically, Michelin’s brand recognition has been predicated on the unwavering independence of its inspectors, whose standards translate from guide to guide. But in an era marked by competition from World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Instagram influencers, and crowdsourced review platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor, Michelin’s relevance may be waning — particularly as the restaurant industry seeks to course-correct from decades of Eurocentric takes on haute cuisine. Amid all this change, Michelin doesn’t seem to see much use in becoming more transparent about its financial relationships, even in a world where news travels faster, to a far wider global audience, than it did back when the guide started publishing in 1920. That hasn’t stopped persistent reporters from poking holes in the guide’s carefully cultivated image of editorial independence. Can the guide continue to maintain its brand reputation when it’s accepting private money and sponsorships?

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