If you are a food lover, then you have almost certainly sampled different cuisines from a wide swath of restaurants, and probably you have memories of a few favorite meals. Perhaps you are so enthusiastic that your friends started refering to you as a “foodie”, either complimentarily or pejoratively. Maybe you went so far as to rank order your favorite restaurants, and since anything worth doing is worth overdoing, you found yourself asking the question: What is the best restaurant in the world?

It turns out I have all of the above traits with a double dose of anything-worth-doing-is-worth-overdoing, so this is the first of two posts on how I went about answering the question. Naturally, everyone has different tastes and that will lead them to different paths with different answers. My path led me to the Church of the Michelin Star.

As mentioned elsewhere, it took me until high school before learning there is more to good food than my family’s Italian-centric cuisine. Going to college and grad school in the Boston area guarenteed a broadening of horizons, and I was fortunate to have friends from a wide distribution of backgrounds organizing trips to many different types of restaurants. Unfortunately, choosing a eaterie while in school usually comes with financial limitations; the best restaurants tended to be the most expensive, so those were saved for special occasions.

Finding Boston’s best restaurants was not easy in the pre-internet world, and broadly, there were two approaches. The first was to eat at as many restaurants as possible. This approach was a lot of fun, especially with the metabolism of a twenty-year old who burns an insane number of calories on classes or martial arts or pretty much anything that a twenty-year old does. Unfortunately, a quick calculation involving the number of restaurants in existence and the size of the average student’s wallet revealed the impracticality of exploring more than a small fraction of Bostonian eateries. The second approach was to descend upon the campus bookstore in search of restaurant guides, and compile a list of the best restaurants. It’s probably obvious that no guides were ever actually purchased since we were impoverished students saving money for the actual meal.

The first few of the restaurants on that list felt like a discovery of new lands, and they were a feast for the senses, with an awakening of tastes, aromas, and textures. It turns out that I was lucky to start as a young guy; students of biology will tell you that the olfactory and taste senses achieve their peaks in the twenties. Of course, the experience was more than just great food: The restaurant staff play a large role, almost as a performance. I believed I had found the pinnacle of civilization and was fortunate that my choice of college put me so close to it.

Then a funny thing happened during my senior year. A girlfriend and I decided to take a trip to Europe during MIT’s January term. She had a colorful uncle who we met in Geneva, who we will name Henry for this story. Henry had finished grad school in the US in the early 70s, went off to Europe, and never really returned. As near as I could tell, he just stayed to become a bon vivant, spending a lot of time studying good food and wine and, well, life. Despite feeling like a kid on a European tour, I got along inexplicably well with this full-fledged adult. Henry was an excellent host to a couple of college students, and he decided to take our eductation into his own hands: He told us with some gravity that he was going to bring us to a Michelin one-star restaurant.

The voice inside my head had a reaction: One star? So what? I did not know what a Michelin one-star restaurant implied when I walked in, but it turned out to be the nicest dining experience I had ever had at that point. I was, frankly, stunned; it was a revelation that people would dedicate their lives to creating the world’s greatest meals, and could transform food into such a high art form.

It also finally dawned on me that the campus bookstore was not the most worldly source of information for restaurants. Most folks have heard of the Michelin Tire Company, which is one of the oldest tire corporations and is based in France, but it was pretty much the last company that I would have sought out for advice about restaurants during college. Early in automobile history, companies published travel guides as marketing to encourage automobile travel, and Michelin took the approach of including reviews of hotels and restaurants: The more mileage that is put on the tires, the more tires they sell.

The Michelin guide was first published in 1926, and it has since become something of a bible. The best restaurant reviews were also awarded “Michelin Stars”, and their graphical star is shown here:   Frankly, when you consider gluttony is still one of the seven deadly sins, a pentagram would have been more apt, but for reasons known only to a tire company, a rounded six-point star is their mark of approval. In any case, unlike modern internet ratings, not all restaurants were given a star rating; the guide will tell you that only those who “consistently deliver an outstanding meal” were awarded even a single star. The maximum number ever awarded was three stars, and if you are a foodie those places were worthy of a special pilgrimage. At the time of my first visit to a one star in 1986, there were 574 restaurants with one star, 84 with two stars, and 20 with three stars. The ratings were carried out by a 16 person Michelin panel, who we can safely assume have never been given accolades by doctors for their cholestoral readings. As an aside, it’s also worth noting that Geneva was included in the French guide, which was something of a poke in the eye to the Swiss: Geneva has a history of going back and forth between French and Swiss ownership, and could be perceived as Michelin replanting a French flag on the beach of Lake Geneva.

At the end of the meal with Henry, I had many questions. I asked the one foremost in my mind: If that was a one-star experience, what on earth happens in a three-star restaurant that doesn’t happen in a one star? Henry smiled, and then he delivered a critique of the best meal of my life up to that point. There was some extreme nit picking on the harmony of flavors, and there was some other nit picking about the second course (there were many courses) that was presented with a temperature a little low. You could say it was because we talked too much and the food got cold, or you could say it was because the plates were not sufficiently warm for a January meal.

He also waxed poetic on the proper amount of attention from the restaurant staff: It should be extremely attentive while simultaneously being completely unobtrusive. As near as I can tell, the wait staff were hired partially for their empathy and clairvoyance, and during that era, being a waiter in a Michelin-starred restaurant had a social cachet in Europe that was hard to understand in American culture.

In order to provide an example of great service, Henry related his ultimate three-star restaurant story. He was trying to impress a woman and took her to a Michelin three star. In the middle of an amazing meal, while the woman was momentarily looking away, Henry accidentally knocked over a bottle of wine, spilling it on the table and himself. Before the woman even looked up, a waiter appeared out of nowhere and began apologizing profusely for having so clumsily spilled the wine. Quelle catastrophe! The waiter didn’t know how such a thing could have happened! Henry graciously told him it was ok and that accidents happen. The waiter then insisted on at least paying for the cleaning of Henry’s clothes; Henry thanked the waiter for the offer and assured him that would not be necessary. I have no doubt that Henry left an additional service¹ that is still being talked about.

By the time I left Europe, I realized there was something of a religous zealotry about Michelin-starred restaurants, and I would have happily joined the religion but alas, I was a student. Worse still, I would continue living the student life for quite some time as I took a very scenic route through grad school. It was nearly a decade before I started earning an honest paycheck, one that was sufficient for tithing in the Church of the Michelin Star.

[to be continued]

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1. French for “tip”. Usually the service is included in the bill, but customers sometimes leave extra when the staff have gone above and beyond. ↩