They are the Oscars of the restaurant world, something every serious chef strives to earn, but for the average diner, how good a guide are Michelin stars? asks FIONA McCANN.
IT’S LITTLE WONDER that the Michelin man boasts more than a few spare tyres, given that the folks at his parent company have long been the arbiters of dining out.
Strange though it may be to take taste tips from a tyre company, Michelin has long been a guide to decent victuals, and its star-rating system is now an internationally recognised aid for separating the delectable from the inedible.
It’s not all that surprising, seeing as the Michelins have longevity on their side. Long before there was the Dubliner restaurant guide or even a Tom Doorley, there was André Michelin, who published the first guide to France back in 1900 as a car-drivers’ companion, with petrol stations, garages, vehicle suppliers and tyre shops listed with hotels and restaurants along the routes around the country.
The key to it all was, and still is, a team of enviable gourmet inspectors, who visit restaurants and hotels anonymously and evaluate them on a range of criteria. If their taste buds tingle, they go back. And then they go back again. If the food keeps performing, the eatery gets a star (marking it out as a very good restaurant in its category), two stars (pointing to excellent cooking that’s worth a detour) or the much-coveted three stars, indicating exceptional cuisine that’s worth the journey itself, and currently held by some 56 restaurants throughout the world.
Though none of those three-star joints is in Ireland, we still have our two-starred Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, not to mention the one-star delights that are Chapter One, L’Écrivain, Thornton’s, Mint and Bon Appetit.
Which is all very well and good, but do they really matter? Absolutely, says Derry Clarke of L’Écrivain. “It is important on a personal level to chefs,” he says of the Michelin-star rating. “Among our peers, it’s a nice thing to have . . . In France especially, a chef wouldn’t rate you as a chef unless you had a star.”
So how does a Michelin star reflect on the restaurant?
“A Michelin star is all about consistency – what you get tonight you’ll get next week. It’s a very hard thing to deliver in a restaurant,” says Clarke, who got his first star back in 2003. Did the punters come flocking in as a result? “There wasn’t a massive difference,” says Clarke. He points to what he sees as a misconception in Ireland that a Michelin star implies exclusivity and expense. Our neighbours in England and France pay a little more attention to such things. “For some reason, the English really go by the Michelin guide,” says Clarke. “You will get people coming over for lunch on a regular basis.”
BUT WHAT DO the punters say? For a foodie who dines out on a regular basis, does a Michelin star make a difference?
“Last year when Dylan McGrath got the star for Mint and Oliver Dunne got the star for Bon Appetit, we’d all heard of McGrath, but we hadn’t heard of Dunne,” says Caroline Hennessy, a food journalist and blogger who dines out regularly. “We suddenly thought ‘Oh, that might be a place worth trying’.”
So she did. “He’s got the whole Michelin-star thing going on out there in Malahide: the service, the wine, it was fabulous. But I wouldn’t have heard about it until he got the Michelin star.”
For Hennessy, though, the Bib Gourmand accolade also bestowed by Michelin, which recognises good food at moderate prices, is more of a draw. “The Bib Gourmand [ratings] are very good indicators, especially for places around the country, because the Michelin-starred restaurants are only based in Dublin.”
Regardless of whether you dine in Michelin-starred restaurants, however, there is a certain fillip in finding the list of starred eateries in Ireland is growing.
“Last year when the information came out about the two new stars for Dublin, it was ‘Wow, this is amazing’,” admits Hennessy. “And when you see that the same people got the stars again, that’s a whole year of hard work keeping standards at a certain level.”
Some are dismissive of the Michelin star rating, particularly given the firmament of stars bestowed on Tokyo restaurants last year. Add to this the pressure to perform that can come with winning a star, and you can see why one French chef back in 2005 went so far as to give his star back.
Yet Clarke cautions against the Michelin-star cynics. “You hear some chefs saying it’s not important, they’ll slag it off. They’re the ones who’ll never get one,” says Clarke. “I’ve never met a chef who had a star slag it off.”