October 5, 2006
Gastronomique: Thomas Keller Kicks Alice Waters's Michelin Ass!*
The new Michelin was stingy with stars for San Francisco: no 3 stars restaurants (the only one in the wider bay area being the French Laundry in Napa), two 2 stars (Aqua and Michael Mina), and a 12 one stars (Fleur de Lys, La Folie, the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Rubicon, Bushi-Tei, Quince, Range, Acquerello, Masa's, Gary Danko, Boulevard, Fifth Floor). Alice Waters got only one tiny puny star for her Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Spanked!
Every food critic is shocked, shocked!, to discover that a bunch of out-of-town restaurant reviewers disagree with their own taste. The Chron's Michael Bauer does not understand why the Michelin did not reprint his top 100 list in extenso, and goes looking for clues. He finds typos here and there, which means the whole book just cannot be trusted.
SF Weekly reviewer Robert Lauriston, wearing his chowhound hat, is convinced that it is a French conspiracy: even the Italian restaurants on the list are really French. The Michelin crew is just a bunch of chauvinistic pigs, since everyone know the best food is really Italian, and Incanto and Oliveto should be included. And that the truth, because French straw is only in the other person’s eye, and what Italian beam you talkin' about?
*post title by Gothamist Jen
The main complaint is that the Michelin did not get the Bay Area, meaning that their reviewers were not privy to our secrets: that place they omitted is popular not because it's over-rated and people buy in the hype, that place is good and the Michelin just does not know the Bay Area. Oh, and that locally sourced organic ingredients trump any other consideration.
Zagat, not to be eclipsed by the Michelin guide, sent Marc Kornblau on KQED’s Forum to mention that they too exist, and they give up to 29 points instead of 3 measly stars (this is *not* an actual quote). Because, lost in the Michelin brouhaha, the new Zagat San Francisco 2007 guide has been released. We did not chat with Nina this year, but we still browsed through our copy. We have a fondness for Zagat, since they cover a wider range of restaurants. Oh, sure, their top 10 places will be the same fancy-pantsy downtown expense account places that you’d find in the Michelin or Bauer’s 4 star restaurants, but the Zagat lists little neighborhood places and "bang for the buck" lists that go closer to our heart and wallet.
Jumping in the fray, the October issue of Wine Spectator made a list of the top 25 San Francisco restaurants, which we read and forgot right away: almost all places fit within a stone's throw of the financial center, and our eyes glazed over, and we returned the copy we had borrowed during our plane ride. We wondered why we had not asked our other neighbor for his copy of Men's Health, the largest men’s magazine, where we could have learned all 9 get-rich-quick scheme and 30 ways to spice up our sex life, rather than indeed, Gary Danko is good, and Michael Mina is great. And we are a large man too!
After all these stars and best restaurant lists, check out the other definitively blue collar end of the spectrum in the picture on the side. This thing is from the Target food court in the Tanforan shopping center: it’s a Tchernobyl mutant pretzel cross-breeding with a cinnabon roll. It is so fundamentally wrong and ugly, it reminded us of the first Alien movie, with the roll in the role of the monster coming out of the womb of the poor astronaut-slash-impregnated pretzel.
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To be fair, Michael Bauer did more than just point out typos. He reported some factual errors taht were pointed out to him, and they were not just of the slightly-out-of-date variety that will always happen with these published guidebooks. Some of the people mentioned in the reviews haven't been at the reviewed restaurant for years, for example.
And as far as I can tell, he doesn't dismiss the Michelin Guide out of hand, and the criticisms in his blog post were made by other people he talked to.
Of course, I can't really tap into the minds of the status hounds that care about whether the restaurant where they are eating is a 3, 2, or 1 star (or a 29, or on Bauer's 100, etc.). Meh.
I don't understand what all the fuss is about. All the self-proclaimed "foodies", if they are real restaurant industry insiders, KNOW that the Michelin guide is (a) famously stingy with its stars and (b) biased in favor of French restaurants and (c) biased in favor of French restaurants located in France.
To complain about it is like picking up a hooker in the Tenderloin and being surprised when you wake up with V.D.
Really, Michelin is a guide for visitors to use in the Bay Area. In particular, the whole methodology and approach is infused with European sensibilities, so really its ideal use is for a European tourist visiting San Francisco. Most European tourists won't be looking for a detailed analysis of the entire Bay Area food scene. Michelin is not, and should not be viewed as, a guide for locals -- who generally choose restaurants with a different set of criteria.
And, honestly, do we care that much if Michelin doesn't report some of our awesome, but relatively less-known spots? I'm rather happy with a lot of them just remaining local secrets.
Ian:
you are right that the errors are more than typos, but look at the cover article in the Chron today: "is Michelin misguided?" where the errors are not related to the ratings made by the reviewers but to the write-ups, made by some editor afterwards. So he definitely conflates two things. It reminds me of the SF police chief saying that the whole chron article about police violence should be dismissed, because they put in a picture of the wrong guy, a cab driver instead of a psycho cop.
Hasn't Michael Bauer been roundly dismissed as a less than scrupulous hack? Does anyone even read the Chron for food reviews? Heck, does anyone read the Chron period? It seems a lot of faux controversy over nothing born from intense inferiority complex, which admittedly sums up a lot of the "debates" in San Francisco.
Cedric: Ok. I'm no Chronicle/Bauer fan boy. But again, to be accurate, the cover article today was written by Carol Ness, not Bauer, and in the original blog posting Bauer didn't dismiss the entire guidebook, but rather reported factual errors and mentioned how some people were disappointed by the ratings and reviews.
But you're absolutely correct that the descriptions had zero to do with the ratings, and should be separate issues. The claims of bias and the misdirection of whether or not Aziza has belly dancers any more (and how can you trust a guide that gets that wrong?) are definitely not coming from uninterested parties.
I still find the debate about stars, and Francophilic bias, rather silly and ultimately boring. Will Chez Panisse close down because they "only" got one star? Will anybody even talk about the ratings in three months? Except the kind of juvenile collector dorks that like to regale their likeminded friends with grand tales of all the three star places they've eaten at?