Michelin ratings rival Boulud’s and NYC’s best restaurants

Life is unfair — and then there’s the 2024 Michelin Guide to New York City restaurants.

If MAGA devotees and far-left progressives can agree on one book to ban, it has to be the tire company’s red-jacket kitchen justice spoof.

Twenty years since Michelin took the Big Apple by storm with its hilariously blundering debut edition, the publication remains influential enough among high-spending foreign visitors to make or break a restaurant – but with no accountability to anyone.

Unlike critics who put their names to their opinions, Michelin offers anonymous “inspectors” who may or may not have been to the places they claim to judge. Their identity and the number of visits they make and when are a closely guarded secret.

Michelin’s international director, Paris-based Gwendal Poullennec, bluntly told Eater.com this week, “We don’t share demographics or numbers. [regarding inspectors] because anonymity is the key to independence.”

Of course, anonymity is also key to mugging someone in an alley.

There has been a lot of buzz over the new book’s findings, which were announced on Monday. Jungsik is New York’s first new three-star restaurant in twelve years! Wowee!

But few seem to have read the rest of the list, which is even more insensitive than previous editions and makes the odd social media post look clever by comparison.

Sure, Michelin has gotten some things right, like Le Bernardin’s clear three stars, but almost everything else is wrong. Not just for individual restaurants, but for entire cuisines.

Michelin awarded stars to no less than fourteen Japanese and eleven Korean places, many of them small counters with prices starting at $200. But only two Italian restaurants received stars – Torrisi and Rezdora each received one.

This in a city full of excellent modern and traditional Italian restaurants, including Marea, Il Gattopardo, Locanda Verde, Lilia and Roberto’s.

To put it another way: Japanese and Korean restaurants received a total of 36 stars to a total of two for Italians. Could there be a bias here?

We’ve enjoyed a revolution in fine Chinese, from high-end Hutong to a dozen gorgeous Szechuan and Fukienese spots in the East and West of the 30s to tiny Cantonese joints on Mott Street – all livers of shredded in Michelin.

In a city of three large, distinct Chinese cities, Michelin blessed exactly one Chinese restaurant with one star — Yingtao on Ninth Avenue, which is simply “Chinese-inspired,” according to its website.

Conspicuously and scandalously absent from the ranks of the star bearers is Tatiana. Kwame Onwuachi’s Bronx-raised, Nigerian-influenced place at Lincoln Center has been named one of New York City’s greatest restaurants by the New York Post, New York Times and The New Yorker — in a rare deal. It has been praised by the James Beard Foundation, Conde Nast Traveler, TimeOut New York and Forbes, who called it “the future of fine dining.”

But apparently the tire company’s invisible judges know a lot more about Nigerian-style short rib suya pastrami than us Big Apple ignoramuses.

The Michelin flat tire ripped through Restaurant Daniel, one of the country’s most sophisticated modern French restaurants, dropping it from two stars to one. Having eaten there twice in the past year. I can attest that it is a three-star place on every level and worthy of its high prices.

The diss won’t matter to Daniel’s legion of admirers in New York. But the star haircut could hurt him because many spenders from Europe still consider the “red book” to be gospel. The death of Michelin in French attitudes was particularly reflected in the suicides of two chefs in recent decades. One feared losing a three-star rating (but didn’t), while the other lost three stars.

Michelin’s three-star list includes only five restaurants in NYC, among them Per Se. Pete Wells of The Times downgraded it from four stars to two in 2016. The beat was so convincing that chef Thomas Keller bought an ad saying, “We’re sorry to disappoint you.”

But it seems like things haven’t changed much. Last week, interim Times critic Melissa Clark declared the tuile holding a bite of salmon as “thick and gooey like an oatmeal cookie” with “grainy” cream. A popular oyster dish had “the cloudy texture of the tapioca pudding served at my great-aunt’s nursing home” and most of her meal was “in that rubbery, starchy vein”.

New Yorkers know that we have the largest collection of restaurants in the world. We don’t need advice from a French tire company. Michelin needs to get on the road before it does more damage.