A Michelin star is an honor awarded to restaurants that offer excellent cooking. Restaurants can receive up to three stars, and these ratings often define careers and reputations. A Michelin star is often equated to the “Oscar of the culinary world.” Each star brings a sense of pride, motivating chefs to be more innovative and generate healthy competition with new trends in the industry.
However, the prestige comes with a price, and chefs often struggle to bear the heavy weight of prominence. The immense stress of both maintaining and attaining the distinction notoriously impacts mental health, creating an obsession with cooking a perfect dish every time.
The award system is run by Michelin, a French tire manufacturing company that publishes the Michelin Guide, a series of guidebooks with restaurant recommendations. The guides were initially handed out for free with instructions on changing tires to increase the use of automobiles, eventually encouraging customers to buy more of their products.
Its sophisticated, up-to-date map of French cities and diverse tips for traveling led the Michelin Guide to become an essential part of road trips at that time. The informative guides also led to economic development in the restaurant industry and a growing interest in consuming good food, making the books spread globally.
Michelin stars are decided each year by Michelin representatives who visit restaurants as anonymous inspectors to ensure credibility. They subjectively rate dishes with five criteria: the quality of the ingredients, the harmony of flavors, the techniques, the chef’s personality expressed on the plate, and the consistency of the menu. Currently, there are around 2500 one-star, 500 two-star, and 150 three-star restaurants all over the world, approximately 200 of which are in the United States.
A Michelin star is currently one of the most prestigious and credible accolades in gastronomy, with a restaurant’s number of stars representing its excellence. Along with the recognition, it creates an impressive transformation of the restaurant’s profits when stars are given. A French Michelin star chef, Joël Robuchon, explained the economic effects in an interview with the magazine Food&Wine: “With one Michelin star, you get about 20% more business. Two stars, you do about 40% more business, and with three stars, you’ll do about 100% more business.”
There is an issue regarding the constituted unfairness in Michelin reviews, though. The Michelin panel only goes to certain regions, and most of their stars are given to fine-dining restaurants, which usually serve special meal courses, often at high prices, in a formal setting. Also, stars are decidedly biased toward French cuisine and Caucasian chefs. In 2022, Gerald Sombright became the first Black chef with a Michelin star. To date, there are only nine Michelin restaurants with Black chefs. It seems like Michelin is attempting to add more diversity recently; however, Black chefs still only make up 2% of the paradigm of white predominance.
Due to Michelin stars’ complex influence on the industry, there have also been iconic inverse cases. Some chefs started handing back their stars to feel free from the pressure of flawless precision and details. In 2014, Chef Frederick Dhooge of ‘t Huis van Lede gave his one star back, pointing out on Facebook the confinement the Michelin stars create, writing that “the essence of the kitchen lies with the product, prepared according to the classical way and with respect for our own gourmet traditions and values. We noticed that this is not always understood by a group of customers that expect a spectacle of stars and points.”
In the last two decades, two chefs committed suicide after losing their stars, including Bernard Loiseau, who was a real-life inspiration for the Disney movie, Ratatouille’s main character, Auguste Gusteau. If restaurants fail to continue to meet the evaluation standard, stars can be taken away, and the fear of the announcement each year pressure and threaten chefs, leading them to finally succumb.
The rating system is concurrently portrayed as a curse and a blessing, strongly influencing the culinary field. Still, it is a long aspiration and dream that almost every chef hopes to achieve. It is crucial to understand that the number of stars can not completely reflect their passion and commitment throughout their life journey to the art of cooking.
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