Why Diners—and Chefs—Are Turning Away From the Michelin Guide

Before a recent trip to Hong Kong, I did what many travelers do: I googled the local Michelin Guide ratings and booked a three-star table. The menu proclaimed exceptional Cantonese, but what I got left me unimpressed. The right dishes were there, but the quality and service I expected were not. The food was curiously bland, oily, rote—and the waitstaff was so indifferent that I had to beg for my wineglass to be refilled. I’ve had better meals in linoleum-floor joints in New York City’s Chinatown and truly dazzling experiences still at other legit three-star efforts such as Thomas Keller’s Per Se and Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin. So how had this place managed to earn one of fine-dining’s top designations? When I quizzed colleagues in the city, they admitted that the restaurant’s decline was an open secret. Its recurring stars were a subject of industry speculation. 

But my disappointment in Hong Kong isn’t an isolated case. The Michelin Guide’s lauding of lackluster restaurants has become so prevalent that experienced diners—bewildered to see stellar performers lose stars or get excluded altogether—have begun to turn elsewhere for solid suggestions. 

“The Daniel demotion was really confusing and dispiriting for the chef community,” says novelist and self-described fine-dining hobbyist Jay McInerney. (He’s referring to Daniel Boulud’s eponymous New York restaurant, once a three-star darling, that fell to two stars in 2015 and to one in December. “I don’t understand why Angie Mar [of Le B.] hasn’t received a star by now. She’s cooking at a higher level than most people in Manhattan,” he continues. “I start to question whether Michelin is in sync with the national mood.” 

Others are less generous. For a certain class of diner, the Guide no longer has “the influence, power, or cachet that it used to,” says Michael Lawrence, the former director of operations for Boulud’s Dinex Group who’s now lifestyle manager at Harry Macklowe’s luxury condo tower One Wall Street. 

Day in and day out, he books tables for residents in the canteens of the crème de la crème—Le Bilboquet, the Polo Bar, or Cipriani—restaurants that don’t have stars and never courted the Guide to begin with. But when diners do want to give their taste buds a thrill, they consult their friends, another trusted concierge, or their favorite mâitre d’, not Michelin. 

“If you are a regular in one of the high-end restaurants, you learn about new restaurants from the staff. And that includes general managers and chefs It’s word of mouth,” Lawrence says. “The mâitre d’ may [ask], ‘Have you been to San Sabino? Or Chez Fifi?’ That’s really how it works.” 

But if diners are disappointed with the Guide’s misfires, the cooks themselves are furious. In January, French chef Marc Veyrat announced that Michelin inspectors will be prohibited from entering his new eponymous eatery in Megève, where you can dine for about $470 a head. “I don’t want to be in [the Michelin Guide], and I am prepared to put up a sign outside [saying]: ‘Michelin Guide banned,’ ” he told Le Parisien. 

At least some portion of that disdain stems from the harsh reality that inclusion in the Guide no longer assures the spoils the honor once conferred. “I’ve been on both sides,” says an American chef and restaurateur who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I have retained a star and gone through that pressure. I’ve gone through not having a star and not having that pressure. To be honest with you, it made zero difference to my business.” 

The benefit of this shift away from the Guide’s mercurial standards is that it separates the wheat from the chaff. If diners need the imprimatur of a star rating to inspire curiosity about a restaurant, it might be a signal that they don’t know their asparagus tongs from their marrow scoops. 

“There’s two audiences [for fine dining]: finance bros who flock to Torrisi and Carbone, because that’s where their peers go—and certainly they don’t care about Michelin stars,” McInerney says. And then, he adds, “there are people who genuinely care about the food and who debate each other about whether the last meal was as good as the one before it.” 

For real connoisseurs, such good taste is its own reward. As the Guide continues to overload its award-winning restaurants with a glut of booking requests, less-formal networks are promoting truly great dining rooms for those in the know. And while buying hard-to-get reservations is now illegal in New York City, the practice—prevalent in Paris, Chicago, and Miami—marks the diners who pay for access as outsiders. As Lawrence puts it, “It’s people who don’t know anybody and are trying to impress a client.”