Michelin Guide Inspector Currently Doing the Beijing Rounds
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To outsiders, the inner workings of the Michelin Guide and its elusive stars, high esteem, and ability to make-or-break restaurants on the global dining map can appear mysterious and murky. As the team behind the famous French dining guide put it: "With 60 hotel stays, 250 meals, and nearly 19,000 miles traveled per inspector, and some 45,000 readers' letters received and read yearly – there's much, much more to the Michelin Guide's system of reviewing and awarding restaurants than meets the regular diner's eye."
According to popular legend, critics are so discrete that most restaurants do not even know they were visited and reviewed until they appear in the pages of the venerable guide. It may then come as a surprise to hear that the Beijing F&B community is currently abuzz with talk of a "gray-haired man with a suitcase who is dining alone," widely considered to be a Michelin critic. The gossip mill has kicked into gear, and with it, the service, each restaurant putting their best face forward in hopes of securing one of the most coveted awards in the world of food.
Paul Pairet's multi-sensory dining experience at Ultraviolet is the only Shanghai restaurant to have secured three stars
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But what does being scrutinized by a Michelin inspector actually entail and how do Beijing's insiders feel about it? After all, the honor can prove to be a double-edged sword: when the Michelin Guide visited Shanghai back in 2016 – the first mainland Chinese city to be included – one restaurant was forced to close the day after it received a star, on account of not having the correct licenses.
Following the release of its third edition of the Michelin Guide, Shanghai is now the proud owner of no less than 34 Michelin stars including three awarded to Paul Pairet's Ultraviolet, the only venue to receive the maximum ranking. When Hong Kong got its first guide in 2009, featured restaurants complained of suffering the "Michelin curse" i.e. being forced out of business when opportunistic landlords increased their rent. Luckily we don't have those here, ahem.
Of course, loose lips sink ships, and many of the top Beijing chefs we reached out to were unwilling to talk on the record about such a high-stakes award. However, the overall consensus was that the Michelin Guide's arrival in the capital is long overdue, and will make for a positive influence on the city's dining scene. Jarrod Verbiak, head chef at Rosewood's Bistrot B, told the Beijinger that it's "an opportunity to vindicate those restaurants that are truly committed to quality."
By and large, the consensus among Beijing's top restaurateurs is that a Beijing Michelin Guide is a positive thing, a viewpoint shared by Jarrod Verbiak, head chef of Bistrot B
While restaurants will do their best to guess the true identity of their mystery diner, inspectors continue to exercise "complete anonymity" so as not to bias the service – so you won't catch them taking notes at the table. As for the criteria upon which a restaurant's excellence is determined, the inspectors rate the experience – from reservation to departure – via five main criteria: quality, cooking techniques, the personality of the chef in his cuisine, value for money, and consistency between visits.
Nearly 120 years since the first Michelin Guide was published, Beijing is on the cusp of finally having its own, with the results to be released sometime between October and November. Until then, we and Beijing's restaurants can only sit back and deliberate as to who may receive the city's first round of stars, and as one of our interviewees put it: "No matter what and how people talk about [the restaurants], the most important is that they do talk about them – this is also an important reason why the Michelin Guide still exists to this day."
READ: Dig Into Beijing's Best New Restaurant Openings, Mar-Jul 2019
Images: hosco.com, Business Insider, Sui
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