Critics say they encourage elitist cooking and inflated egos. The compilers say they help consumer choice and put bums on seats. So are the restaurant guidebooks the industry`s saviours or sinners?
Only those with the dullest of senses will have failed to notice the publication last
month of the latest Michelin Guide.
Arguably one of the most anticipated events in the restaurant calendar, the famous red book brings with it a media circus that plays out with uncanny predictability. First comes the hurried compilation of lists by newspaper editors of restaurants whose stars have risen or waned accompanied by stifling hyperbole about the state of the country’s dining scene; next the heated exchanges between industry commentators on the revelations and finally the reaction from either jubilant or aggrieved chefs.
Reputations are formed or broken. Recriminations fly, as do the odd pots and pans. Careers are propelled or stopped in their tracks, such is the power the guide wields.
Yet behind the hype Michelin, and indeed the UK’s other main guides, Harden’s, Zagat, the AA, Time Out and The Good Food Guide, have come under increased flak from certain quarters of the national press for having a damaging influence on the nation’s cuisine. Critics argue that the guides’ meritocratic systems have led to a surge in elitist cooking and are the scourge of the restaurant industry. So why have guides, once regarded as the custodians of good food, fallen from grace and do they really do more harm than good?
The critics’ positions are characteristically unambiguous. Sunday Times critic AA Gill recently said Michelin’s star system “has encouraged restaurant food to be snobby, twee, hagiographic, meritlessly elitist, uncomfortable and bereft of any human emotion that is desirable or attractive”.
Financial Times food writer Nicholas Lander also says the star system is counter-productive. “I know chefs who have gone to Michelin saying their cooking was above their star ranking and Michelin telling them what they have to do to get another star. The chefs have turned round and said they can’t do that and make money,” he says.
Industry impact
While the guidebook compilers all say they are not there to either help or hinder the industry, but to rather give a snapshot of it, such criticisms are not without substance. Their grading systems inevitably have a wider impact than just steering people in the direction of good food and a desire for stars and plaudits has unquestionably altered the way many chefs cook today.
“Chefs are too obsessed with Michelin,” says Alain Ducasse. “The media put a lot of pressure on chefs about Michelin because they talk about it so much.” So much pressure, in fact, that Ducasse says a contract for one of his hotel restaurants insisted he achieved three stars within three years.
Michel Roux, chef-patron at Le Gavroche, shares Ducasse’s view. “Michelin stars are very impressive. It is a highly respected guide but the biggest mistakes chefs can make is to cook in the style that they think the guide is looking for,” he says.
Le Gavroche, now a two-Michelin star restaurant, lost its third star in 1993. This, says Lander, was no bad thing. “When Le Gavroche lost its star it was a blessing in disguise,” he says. “It took the pressure off.” However, it is not the guides themselves but, perversely, the media that so vociferously rails against them, that are the root cause by placing too much emphasis on getting a star, argues 9Ducasse. “It is not Michelin’s fault but the media’s,” he says.
Graham Garret, owner of the Michelin-starred West House in Biddended, agrees. “I don’t go along with the press saying it promotes bad cooking. The media are continually talking about Michelin style food but what is it? When we got our star I was cooking with food from local farmers’ markets, I certainly wasn’t cooking for a star.”
Predictably, maybe, Derek Bulmer, editor of the Michelin Great Britain and Ireland guide, also blames the media. “The media creates this hype by focusing on a small segment of our guide,” he says. “All they want to look at is the top end restaurants, which they think the guide is all about. It is a misconception that had an element of truth about it 25 years ago, but not now.”
Instead, Bulmer argues that, by featuring restaurants and handing out stars or grades, guides are a force for good for the industry. He points to the thousands of requests for an inspection the guide gets each year, as an example, and the improvement in food over the past few decades.
“All guides have contributed towards raising the standard of food,” says Bulmer. “You only have to look at the pub scene (also covered by Michelin), which served scampi and chips and ploughmans 25 years ago and now has some first class restaurants.”
More importantly, maybe, is how the guides encourage people to visit restaurants based on a good review. Pied ? Terre, for example, a darling of the guidebook scene, has five reviews on its website as a way of encouraging people to visit.
“From the point of view of what guides do for restaurants, the most looked-at restaurant reviews on our site receive 5,000 visits a month,” says Square Meal editor Ben McCormack. “Guides play an important part in providing information to restaurant-goers, and restaurants with customers.” Indeed, the coveted Michelin star has been the saviour for many a UK restaurant. Many chefs report that achieving a star has been a boon to business. “The day my restaurant got its star business tripled. The phone rang off the hook for a year,” says Garrett. “Michelin still carries huge kudos and our customers use it. We get people in from France, Belgium and Holland.”
Even The Fat Duck, one of the UK’s few three- Michelin starred restaurants and a trailblazer in modern cuisine, might no longer exist had it not been awarded a third star when it did, Heston Blumethal has admitted. Thanks to the interest the accolade generated, the Fat Duck
turns away customers rather than clamouring for more. As The Good Food Guide’s consultant editor Elizabeth Carter says, “Everyone wants to be in the guide. We put bums on seats and we know we do because we monitor our annual award winners.”
The unwanted side-effects
The obvious flipside to this, of course, is restaurants that fail to get into the guides could be hit. A Michelin star can add an average of 30 per cent to a restaurant’s takings, but the loss of a star can cause a similar fall in revenue. Similarly, those on the end of a poor review can see sales plummet, a fact which riles the critics, who believe the fate of restaurants should not be held in the hands of a group of inexperienced, self-confessed ‘foodies’ with arbitrary views.
To return to Gill’s famously barbed views, all guides are “a curse and a bane on hospitality,” he says, with Zagat and Harden’s only useful for finding phone numbers. Guardian writers, meanwhile, have attacked The Good Food Guide for containing “statistically insignificant replies” and one posting, in response to Tim Hayward’s blog on the subject, described The Good Food Guide as allowing “an anally retentive bunch of Rotary Club members and advanced driving test holders to produce a guidebook and then get in a separate bunch of inspectors to override them”. Time Out is “limited and partial,” says Matthew Fort.
It isn’t difficult to see why guides are the bugbear of food writers. As a compilation of views from ‘untrained’ diners, Zagat and Harden’s fly in the face of the single expert view of the restaurant critics, who argue that, just as you wouldn’t take architectural tips for a new house from a man down the pub, you wouldn’t visit a restaurant based on the views of an anonymous group of diners. The guides’ use of often superfluous quotes from reviewers also understandably irks journalists drilled to avoid redundant phrases such as the food is “well done”, that appear regularly in the pages of the guides.
Many also have an open distaste for the way inspector-led guides, with their anonymity and concealed notebooks, are put together. As Lander says, “I adore restaurants, I have been involved with them for 30 years, but my job from hell would be a guidebook inspector.”
The critics are also suspicious of the altruistic nature the guides often portray themselves as having. The quote, “You can corrupt one man. You can’t bribe an army,” adorns the opening page of every edition of The Good Food Guide but its critics argue the guide is not just about consumer empowerment but is also a vehicle to make money. Guardian food critic Jay Rayner, for example, recently accused Harden’s of over hyping its findings (“Beware the Hardens brothers bearing press releases”) to sell more copies. This criticism was also levelled at Michelin when its first guide for Tokyo in 2008 sparked controversy when it afforded the city more stars than any other in its history. Foul play, called the critics, who restaurants themselves were the unwitting pawns in a game to grab headlines.
Guides under the microscope
Peter Harden, one half-of the Harden’s guide, however, believes much of this criticism is based on prejudice rather than reason. “A big problem is that the whole subject of guide criticism is largely conducted by food journalists who feel they have no need for a restaurant guide and have their own axes to grind,” he says. “Yet they are the people who set the tone about restaurant guides.”
The Harden brothers are well known for their spats with the national press – Telegraph writer Jasper Gerard is the latest to feel their anger after questioning the guide’s methodology – but they have a point. Many of the restaurant critics who revile the guidebook grading system use a similar one themselves. It is also well known that some restaurants are ‘out of bounds’ for certain critics for social reasons. “They set themselves up as the priests and priestesses who control the temple but they have social pressures not to say bad things about certain people,” says Harden.
His main grievance, however, is with the notion that by collating the views of normal paying customers to draw its conclusions Harden’s is no more than a list of “insignificant” opinions. He dismisses the idea that the views of the layman are any less valid than those of a critic’s or an inspector’s. “If you look at the sort of places we like and those that Michelin likes the similarities are strong. The sort of restaurants our people in their ‘general ignorance’ like the critics love as well. If there is no wisdom in that then why have they come up with the same answers as the critics?”
He is also unapologetic about issuing the odd, and sometime controversial, press release. “We tend to be more iconoclastic. We say the emperor is wearing no clothes before the others.”
That’s not the say Harden’s blindly takes all the 85,000 reviews it receives each year – called the bog roll – at face value. Its system automatically flags up people whose marking procedure is unusual to avoid restaurateurs skewing the system, or “stuffing the ballot” as Harden calls it. “Some restaurants, especially the popular London ones, can receive hundreds of reviews a year. You need a lot of people to stuff the ballot if you’ve got 100 people reviewing a restaurant.”
The Good Food Guide relies on comments from readers but, unlike Harden’s, it also uses a team of around 40 inspectors. Restaurants are given a score out of 10, with only the Fat Duck achieving top marks in its 2009 edition.
While the guide is unable to visit every restaurant each year all reviews are based on inspector visits or reader feedback and every restaurant featured has been freshly nominated.
“We encourage reader feedback and to a great extent it drives the guide,” says Carter. “But we have a solid group of trusted inspectors. No guide can claim they visit every restaurant each year. If you do the sums it would bankrupt us.” Carter rejects the criticism that the guide is a compilation of views from “anally retentive driving instructors”. “This does not describe how we work. Many people are passionate about food, it doesn’t matter if they are driving test holders, everyone has an opinion. All guides are put together with an element of fact, intuition and passion.”
London web-based guide Square Meal, founded in 1989 by businessmen Simon White and Mark de Wesselow to fill a perceived gap in restaurant guides for a city audience, takes a similar approach.
It employs around 30 writers who each cover a specific London beat. The best restaurants are
awarded either one or two stars and, like Harden’s, reviews also contain observations from readers who are also encouraged to grade their own visits out of 10 on the Square Meal website.
“Our reviews are a snapshot of the restaurant not a blow-by-blow account of one meal,” says
McCormack. “Offering our own impressions and reflecting what our readers say gives a more
rounded and balanced picture.”
Reviews aren’t always carried out covertly and often visits are arranged through a restaurant PR to keep costs down. So does this compromise them? “The restaurants that have PRs tends to be the ones that generate the most reader comments,” says McCormack. “If we notice a review is out of line with them we will update it. We take the direction of our readers. Some people read our reviews, think we’ve been bribed by the chef and believe the reader comments, others would rather trust a Square Meal writer because they eat out three or
four times a week.”
Not all the guides believe that using ‘amateur’ views or even a grading process is the best
approach, however. The Time Out London Eating and Drinking Guide, for example, contains reviews on some 1,300 restaurants, all of which are visited each year by a team of around 40 expert reviewers, but which carry no score. Series editor Cathy Phillips says this produces the fairest results.
“We are very careful with the reviewers we choose. Anybody can go to a Chinese restaurant and say they didn’t like the duck but that’s not helpful. That just boils down to personal taste. We give a comprehensive view with background on the restaurant and its strengths and weaknesses.”
Instead, the guide employs a rudimentary system that awards a red star to a restaurant that is, of its type, very good, while a green star identifies a budget meal. “I don’t like the grading system,” says Phillips, “that you can rate a restaurant from a few experiences and that that review lasts a whole year. It is not comparable to give different types of restaurants the same number of stars, that is just misleading for people.”
A force for good
Such varied approaches naturally leaves guidebooks sitting targets for the critics, and not
without some justification. Michelin has changed the UK restaurant landscape and altered how some chefs cook. The other guides have, fairly or unfairly, put some places on the map and exiled others.
Yet many of the other criticisms levelled at them seem harsh. A reliance on multiple reviewers and reader feedback, and a good chunk of controversy, are unavoidable side effects of the guidebook business. Harden’s draws on the opinions of some 8,000 reviewers, who visit on average 10 restaurants each a year, so as to cover as much of the UK as possible. Even collectively the broadsheet critics – most of whom get a nosebleed outside of the M25 – couldn’t conduct half this many reviews. Apart from Michelin and the AA, the other expert-only guides are restricted to London.
The guidebook methodology is thorough. I’ve seen the Harden’s system first hand and
accompanied The Good Food Guide on one of its many inspector missions. On both occasions their methods and intentions proved sound.
As for turning a profit, this is no mortal sin. The fact the guides do sell well – although all keep their figures as closely-guarded secrets – shows people read them. This keeps interest in restaurants high and encourages eating out.
Like them or loathe them, in these tough times that can only be good for the industry.
This article appears in the February edition of Restaurant magazine.