One
afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with
shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean
Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in
midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the
world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and
floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in
the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high
neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable
about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if
designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession
as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide.
Conceived
in France at the beginning of the last century, the Michelin guide
today has editions in twenty-three countries and is one of the
best-selling restaurant guides in the world. It operates on the
principle that only reviews by anonymous, professionally trained
experts can be trusted for accurate assessments of a restaurant’s food
and service. Major newspapers like the Times aspire to
anonymity for their restaurant reviewers but rarely achieve it. In his
recent memoir, “Born Round,” Frank Bruni, who served as the Times’
restaurant reviewer from 2004 until earlier this year, describes his
efforts at camouflage—using aliases, wearing a wig and fake
mustache—which were mostly futile once the dust-jacket photograph from
one of his early books was posted on the Internet. Photographs of
Bruni’s successor, Sam Sifton, doctored in several ways to suggest what
he might look like in disguise, began to circulate on foodie Web sites
like Eater months before he took up his duties.
Michelin has
gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its
inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an
inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line
of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about
it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide,
Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists.
The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars
meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of
three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that
Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A
three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is
exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in
France, and only eighty-one in the world.
In 2005, Michelin
launched its first foray into North America, with the publication of
the 2006 New York City guide. (It has also published guides to Los
Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.) Since coming to America,
Michelin has learned that its brand of Gallic opacity and unapologetic
gastronomic élitism has been a tougher sell here than it was in Europe
or Asia. (The Tokyo edition of the guide, which débuted in 2007, sold
more than a hundred thousand copies on its first day.) Five years after
its arrival in New York City, Michelin has failed to knock the Times
from its perch as the premier arbiter of restaurants in the city, or to
outsell the Zagat guide, which relies on customer surveys for its
restaurant rankings.
This fall, in an effort to promote what
the managing director of the guides, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman
named Jean-Luc Naret, calls a “better understanding” of the guides’
means and methods, Michelin launched a Web site, Famously Anonymous, to
explain to Americans the concept of the Michelin inspector; it has also
recently opened Twitter accounts for its reviewers. But by far the most
salient sign of Michelin’s new openness was its decision, this fall, to
allow me to meet—and to eat with—one of its New York-based inspectors.
Naret
joined me and the inspector for lunch. He has a handsome, darkly tanned
face, and favors designer suits with flared-collar shirts and no tie.
Although the inspector was never identified to the staff, Naret, who
eats often at Jean Georges and is well-known to the restaurant’s staff,
considered her anonymity compromised; she would never pay an inspection
visit to the restaurant again. As a precondition of our interview, I
was told that certain details of the inspector’s personal life would be
obscured—or not divulged to me at all. When I asked her name, the
inspector laughed nervously. “No,” she said. “Let’s not even say it.
Make something up.”
I suggested the first thing that came to mind. “Maxime?”
Naret smiled, and then, with a soupçon of extra secrecy, began referring to her as M.
Maxime
is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt
“surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,”
she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for
a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For
most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she
said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”
The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.
“You’re
looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients
and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see
what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something
like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras
brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”
Maxime
eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She
eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were
having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get
to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her
plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the
ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime,
blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an
occupational hazard.
She was tending toward the Arctic char for
her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter
reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.
“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.
“It’s
Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with
white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard,
and a pear salad on the side,” he said.
“It’s new?” she said.
“About a week on the menu.”
She
asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me.
Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter
has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”
The original Guide Michelin
was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother,
Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand,
the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for
cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers
had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would
encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and
hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a
five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns
throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations
for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a
flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes
out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin
brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and
unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a
very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth
a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special
journey.”
Over the years, other publications attempted to
challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of
sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were
obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising
in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo.
A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent,
Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational
corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of
Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food
inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can
run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six
years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant
in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was
two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with
the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives
Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who
helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose
restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a
record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that
counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks
the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days
and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless
debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might
lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March,
provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for
the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for
their restaurants.
Not everyone, however, is convinced that
anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a
dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely
different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a
customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West
Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than
ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the
top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that
there were experts that should tell you what to do.”
“I’d love
to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about
Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major
critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But
this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”
Bernard
Loiseau, the chef and owner of La Côte d’Or, once told a fellow-chef
that if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars he would kill himself.
Loiseau had made a life’s ambition of becoming a three-star chef, a
goal he achieved in 1991, seventeen years after arriving at La Côte
d’Or. His ranking led to a line of frozen food bearing his name and
likeness, and the Legion of Honor, awarded by President François
Mitterrand. But by 2002 Loiseau’s classic cooking was losing ground to
trendier fusion styles, business was slowing, and he was swimming in
debt. As Rudolph Chelminski relates in his 2005 book “The
Perfectionist,” the food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro
hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had
suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early
February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his
third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested
that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and
a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed
himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.
Loiseau’s
death ushered in a dark period for the guide. In early 2004, an
inspector named Pascal Rémy broke the company’s code of silence when he
published a book based on a diary that he had kept of fifteen years on
the road as a Michelin inspector in France. (Rémy, having notified
Michelin of his plans to publish, was fired; he later sued.) Rémy’s
book, “L’Inspecteur Se Met à Table” (“The Inspector Sits Down at the
Table”), described the inspector’s life as one of loneliness and
underpaid drudgery, driving around the French countryside for weeks on
end, dining alone and under intense pressure to file reports. Michelin
had always hinted that it employed roughly a hundred inspectors to
cover Europe, but Rémy claimed that it employed only eleven within
France when he was first hired, in 1988—a number that had shrunk to
five by the time he left, in 2003. Contrary to Michelin’s assertion
that every starred restaurant was revisited several times a year, Rémy
said only one visit every few years was possible. Furthermore, he
wrote, the guide played favorites—most notably with Bocuse, whose
restaurant in Lyons was known, according to Rémy, to have declined
drastically in quality yet continued to hold three stars. Rémy’s
revelations made the front page of Le Monde. Derek Brown, the director of the guides at the time, denied Rémy’s assertions in an interview in the Times,
but he remained vague about how many full-time inspectors the guide
employs in France and offered an anemic rebuttal to Rémy’s claim that
certain three-star chefs were untouchable: “There would be little sense
in saying a restaurant was worth three stars if it weren’t true, if for
no other reason than that the customer would write and tell us.”
The
Rémy affair occurred during Brown’s final year at the guide. As his
successor, Michelin hired the charismatic and outgoing Naret, who
worked for many years as a hotelier, but whose professional focus has
not been food. He boasts of giving more than two thousand interviews a
year, in which he tells journalists how many inspectors Michelin
employs in France (about fifteen), throughout the world (ninety), and
in the United States (ten).
Naret introduced the idea of
expanding into North America and chose New York City as the best place
to start. The first New York City guide, which appeared in November,
2005, was created by a team of five European inspectors, who examined
fifteen hundred restaurants in all five boroughs, and selected five
hundred for inclusion. Their selection was criticized, by some, as
Francocentric. The Times noted that more than half the
restaurants that received at least two stars “could be considered
French.” Among the one-star restaurants was the now defunct La Goulue,
which one highly regarded New York food critic describes as “this dinosaur
of an outdated, mediocre kind of French bistro on the Upper East Side.”
And the 2006 guide failed to award stars to Eleven Madison Park (Danny
Meyer’s haute-cuisine restaurant), Craft (the “Top Chef” head judge Tom
Colicchio’s take on contemporary American food), “or any number of
celebrated restaurants,” the critic adds. “It was one of those things,
like, only a bunch of French people could respond that way.”
Naret,
who says that he never intended to continue to use European teams,
established an office in New York for the next year’s guide and began
recruiting New Yorkers. He received thirty-five hundred applications.
Though
born in New York City, Maxime moved with her family to a nearby “rural
countryside” town, which, she says, has “an extraordinarily active
foodie community.” Maxime’s family was discerning about food, and came
into the city frequently to sample the restaurants. “I ate falafel at
Mamoun’s and bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters before I’d even
heard of a peanut-butter sandwich,” she said. The family also travelled
abroad, and she learned early about the Michelin guide. “Other kids
wanted a Barbie or something. I wanted to go to a three-star restaurant
in Paris.” Maxime’s fascination with food was not confined to haute
cuisine. “It’s a global food passion,” as she put it. Big Macs, tacos
from “these divey little delis in Sunset Park,” Chinese food from “a
Szechuan restaurant that’s a total dump,” even hot dogs from Papaya
King’s grimy corner kiosks in Manhattan elicit groans of pleasure: “Oh,
fantastic hot dogs!”
Linda Bartoshuk, a professor of
community dentistry and behavioral science at the University of
Florida, has for more than three decades done research into genetic
variations in the perception of taste. Through studies of the
disposition and the density of taste buds on the tongues of test
subjects, Bartoshuk has divided people into three categories:
supertasters, tasters, and non-tasters. Most food and wine experts
would fall into the “taster” category. (Supertasters, despite their
name, have too many taste buds and are thus oversensitive to flavor,
and tend to prefer bland foods; non-tasters can eat an exquisite
risotto and say, “Eh.”) I asked Maxime if she believed that she had
some biological advantage when it came to tasting and discerning
flavors. “You could argue that the inspectors have some biological
makeup, or you could argue that they eat so much that they have the
grounds for comparison,” she said. “And they have their training, the
professional training.”
A degree in hospitality, hotel
management, or cooking is mandatory for Michelin inspectors. Every job
that Maxime held, from high school on, had been in the domestic food,
wine, or restaurant industry. She got a master’s from N.Y.U. in food
studies, and obtained a sommelier’s certification. Six years ago, she
was working in a food-and-hospitality job in a city far from New York
when she learned that Michelin was recruiting inspectors to produce a
New York City guide. “I immediately started stalking Jean-Luc,” she
said. She had several preliminary interviews in New York, during which
she was warned about the rigors of life as an inspector—the travel, the
regimen of constant eating, the pressure to fill out meticulously
detailed reports on time, the enforced anonymity, the low pay. (“Let’s
just say it’s not about the money,” she said.)
“The interview
process is a bit like trying to scare you off,” she went on. “You
really have to be committed. It’s your life. It’s not like a
nine-to-five job.” Nor is it all about three-star dining. “The stars
are only ten per cent of the selection,” she said. “The vast majority
of the time, we’re hiking around the Upper East Side, we’re eating at
neighborhood restaurants, we’re hiking around Brooklyn.” Assigned
specific areas of the city to cover, Maxime, who lives in Manhattan,
spends weeks riding the subway out to the farthest reaches of Queens to
make her way through a selection of Thai restaurants, eating two meals
a day, every day, and she typically eats alone, since talking with a
spouse or friend is frowned upon.
After making the first cut,
she was obliged to order and eat a series of dinners in New York
restaurants under the scrutiny of seasoned European inspectors. “You
don’t know what you’re doing, so you’re, like, What do I pick? What do
I eat? And then they show you the wine list to see what wine you
choose.” After the meal, she was required to write a paper analyzing
the experience, while an inspector looked on. “And then there’s also
the kind of covert-ops part,” she said. “You never know the name of the
person you’re meeting, you never know where they’re meeting you until
right before, so they call you up and say ‘Meet me at the corner of XYZ
and XYZ.’ ”
All candidates are flown to France to take part in
the Michelin training program. “You’ve got to go to the mother ship to
understand the origins of the system,” she said. The fundamentals
include not only the star rankings but also the couverts: the crossed-knife-and-spoon icons used to rank the ambience, comfort, and service of a given restaurant. The couverts
range from one to four, in ascending order of quality, and they can be
in black or red ink. (Red ink denotes exceptional service and décor.)
After their time in France, trainees receive additional instruction in
another European country. Maxime was sent to England, where, she says,
she contracted her only bout of food poisoning, from a pork-belly dish.
When she returned to New York, she was required to apprentice
under one of the European inspectors. “There’s no point in sending you
off on your own if you’re going to come back and say, ‘I don’t know if
it’s a two-couvert or a three-couvert’ or ‘Oh, I thought
it was a star’ ”—only to have the senior inspector go back to the
restaurant and discover that the food is, as she put it, “junk.” This
period of apprenticeship generally lasts three to six months, but at
any point an applicant can be told that he or she is not working out.
The
waiter arrived and placed before Maxime a large white plate. At the
center was her foie gras, a short pillar of puréed duck liver on a
piece of crisp toast with a lacy web of caramelized sugar on top; the
sides were studded with cherries and sprinkled with pistachios, and a
transparent sauce, made of white port gelée, surrounded the entire
creation like a moat. She considered the dish for a few moments, as if
trying to determine the best angle of attack. With the side of her
fork, she broke off a piece of the complicated construction, and tasted
it. The dish, which I later tried, activated every sense with which
humans are equipped: the foie gras was smooth and as rich as butter,
its silky texture contrasting with the caramelized sugar, which
shattered like a pane of microscopically thin glass against the teeth
and tongue, its sweetness offset by the sour cherries, the rounded
aromatic flavor of the toasted nuts, and the texture and taste of the
port gelée.
“Excellent,” Maxime said.
I asked her what she liked about it.
“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’ ” she said. “It’s an analysis.
You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At
this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every
single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’ And
then you’re looking at the creativity. Did it work? Did the balance of
ingredients work? Was there good texture? Did everything come together?
Did something overpower something else? Did something not work with
something else? The pistachios—everything was perfect.”
When
her second appetizer arrived—the crab toast topped with toasted sesame
seeds—she dipped the tines of her fork into a thick line of dark-green
sauce that bisected the narrow rectangle of crab toast, and touched it
to her tongue. Her eyes grew wide.
“This sauce is really good,”
she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.”
She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its
precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that
Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later
learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered
English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes
me smile.”
Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress
rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite.
“It’s perfectly cooked,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, it’s textbook.”
For
New York City’s chefs—particularly those raised and trained in
France—the arrival of the Michelin guide was both a blessing and a
curse. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, a three-star
Michelin restaurant in midtown Manhattan, attended culinary school in
France and trained in several three-star restaurants there. “Most of us
very young cooks were aspiring to be one day a three-star chef,” Ripert
told me. “Very few of us were aspiring to have a bistro.” But when
Ripert joined Le Bernardin, in 1991, Michelin did not yet have an
outpost in New York, and there were no plans to open one. “I remember
sometimes chefs here, especially the French ones—and even some American
ones—we were a bit frustrated that we will never be judged by
Michelin,” Ripert said. “But at the same time we were a little bit,
like, more relaxed because obviously the Michelin puts pressure on
chefs and restaurateurs to be excellent.”
Le Bernardin was one
of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas
Keller’s Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House)
that earned three stars in the début issue of the Michelin guide, and
it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that
revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out,
but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated. “Today
when I wake up and I go to work I don’t think guide, I don’t think stars,”
he insisted. “You can’t. When I go to work, I think about my day and
about what I have to achieve during my day as a chef.” Still, Ripert
admitted that, just before the publication of a new guide, he gets
nervous. “It’s not in my mind until a week before, and then every day I
think about it,” he said.
Like Ripert, Jean-Georges Vongerichten
trained in three-star restaurants in France, and he was eager to know
how its inspectors would rate him internationally, yet he also dreaded
that knowledge. At a party thrown by Michelin at Rockefeller Center on
the evening that this year’s star rankings were announced, I spoke to
Vongerichten, a dapper man with slicked-back dark hair and intense dark
eyes. He was “happy and relieved,” he said, to have retained his
three-star ranking for Jean Georges, but he added, “Ah, but we lost a
star, too—for my restaurant JoJo.” He was referring to the moderately
priced restaurant he runs out of a town house on East Sixty-fourth
Street. In the previous four guides, JoJo had earned one star. Now it
had none. Vongerichten was determined to get the rating back. “I will
ask for the report on JoJo,” Vongerichten told me. (Michelin will, on
request, supply to chefs the inspectors’ written report on their
restaurant.) “I will study it. The good thing is, you have a year to
make it better!”
Also at the party was the chef Daniel Boulud,
a short, dark-haired man in a double-breasted suit, who bustled through
the crowd, happily accepting congratulations from all who recognized
him. That morning, Boulud had received a call from Naret informing him
that, for the first time, his restaurant Daniel had been promoted from
two stars to three. To many in the food-and-restaurant industry, it was
overdue. Daniel consistently drew top rankings in the Zagat guide and
for years had earned the Times’ highest rank of four stars. During my lunch with Maxime, I had asked about Michelin’s ranking of Daniel.
“We got beat up a lot the last five years for not giving him three,” she said. “But it wasn’t there.”
“In terms of consistency?” I asked.
“Consistency—and
accuracy,” she said. “It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a
science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something
that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s
not. A fish is cooked accurately—or it’s not. There’s the talent, the
creativity that has to be applied to get a three-star—he has to be a
very talented chef—but there was just a lot of inconsistency.” This
year, she added, “it was so obvious. It was so solid.” Michelin sent
inspectors back to eat at Daniel eight times over the year, Naret told
me. At the stars meeting, which he oversees, every inspector’s report
described the restaurant as faultless.
I talked to Boulud a
couple of days later. Like Ripert and Vongerichten, he trained in
multiple three-star restaurants in France. He pronounced himself “proud
and happy” to get his third star, but I sensed a less immediate embrace
of the Michelin system. When I told him that Naret and the inspector
had said that the restaurant, in previous years, lacked consistency and
accuracy, he didn’t exactly disagree. But he bridled a little, saying,
“My restaurant is extremely chef-driven and extremely market-driven,
and so the menu changes a lot—to the pleasure of my customers. Maybe
the success I have today is because we keep giving pleasure in very
simple ways or sometimes in a very spontaneous way and without
thinking, Oh my God, am I perfectly consistent with that dish? I mean,
Did I create the masterpiece where I don’t need to change anything? I
just need to program it now?”
Boulud’s comments called to mind
criticisms often levelled against Michelin: that its approach to
restaurants and food is too wedded to an ideal of formal, technical
accuracy that is not applicable to restaurants outside France. “When I
lived abroad, in Rome, the Michelin guide was not, to be utterly
candid, very helpful,” Frank Bruni, the former Times restaurant
reviewer, told me recently. “The kinds of restaurant in Italy that
Michelin smiles on are restaurants that feel sort of fussily French.”
He added that the New York guide seemed to be trying to address this.
“In New York—maybe because Michelin is trying to Americanize—you see
the inspectors trying to move beyond that. Right from the get-go they
gave a star to the Spotted Pig”—the chef April Bloomfield’s upscale
pub-food restaurant. “In years since, they’ve given stars to places
like Dressler, in Brooklyn”—a restaurant that serves contemporary
American food with a French twist. “So you can see them trying. . . .
But I wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever
really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system.”
He added, “The other thing that has always made me wonder about
Michelin rankings is that they claim a lot of science to them, but is
there a lot of soul to them? When Michelin describes its own system, I
think, Where is the allowance for just a visceral, emotional response
to a restaurant?” Bruni is also no fan of the couverts and
other icons that Michelin uses: “Those crosses and spoons and all those
symbols—it’s like hieroglyphics, it’s like cave etchings.”
The
waiter arrived with dessert. He placed a rectangular plate before
Maxime. He pointed to one end, where a small piece of strawberry gâteau
rested. “It begins on the right, with cumel-macerated strawberries,
cream-cheese sponge cake, and pear-de-vanilla-center crème fraîche; to
the left is strawberry sorbet swirled with lemongrass glacée and
lavender crisp; and, lastly, a blueberry soda with fresh blueberries,
which you can drink directly from the glass.”
She thanked him, and the waiter moved off.
If
she were on an inspection visit, she said, she would go home directly
after finishing dessert and paying her bill, and begin filling out her
report, which is made in the form of entries in a classification form
supplied to all Michelin inspectors. She would list every ingredient in
everything she ate, and the specifics of every preparation. She would
rate these according to several criteria, including quality of the
products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of
flavors, and creativity of the chef. Then she would fill out the
section that deals with setting, comfort, and service—and that
determines the number of couverts the restaurant will earn.
“I’ll talk about the service, the crowd, the décor, the ambience, the
wine list, the sake list—whatever is applicable,” Maxime said. “The
salt, the glasses, everything about the experience you had from the
second you made the phone call to book the reservation, to when you
walked in the door, when the hostess greeted you—or didn’t greet you—to
whatever little goodies you have at the end of the meal.” For a
restaurant like Jean Georges, filling out the reports would take two to
three hours. A Chinese restaurant might take an hour.
It was
three o’clock by the time we emerged onto the street in front of the
restaurant. I couldn’t recall ever feeling so full. I asked Maxime what
she would do with the rest of her day. She said that she had to work
that night, reviewing a restaurant in another borough.
Which one? I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you that.” ♦
![[Picnic]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OD-AG799_Picnic_G_20110512222702.jpg)
Pernille Pedersen for The Wall Street Journal, Food Styling by Karen Evans, Prop Styling by Angharad Bailey
![[Picnic]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OD-AG798_Picnic_DV_20110512222628.jpg)
Photos by Pernille Pedersen for The Wall Street Journal, Food Styling by Karen Evans, Prop Styling by Angharad Bailey
![[Picnic]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OD-AG801_Picnic_DV_20110512222817.jpg)
Pernille Pedersen for The Wall Street Journal, Food Styling by Karen Evans, Prop Styling by Angharad Bailey
![[Picnic]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OD-AG800_Picnic_DV_20110512222746.jpg)
Pernille Pedersen for The Wall Street Journal, Food Styling by Karen Evans, Prop Styling by Angharad Bailey
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