A study says restaurant guides close restaurants – try telling chefs that
October 21, 2024 11:00 am
There are many things wrong with the Michelin Guide. It is an imperfect beast, well over 100 years old and created by the same French brothers who founded a company that makes tyres.
Why doesn’t Mambow, an astonishingly good Malaysian restaurant in east London, have a star? Why not Erst in Manchester, or the Wilderness in Birmingham? These gaps are difficult to quantify and understand. There is, arguably, a lack of transparency in terms of criteria.
Then again, claims such as this one – “Michelin stars could be the ultimate kiss of death for restaurants” – rile me no end. This study by University College London (UCL) suggested that, of restaurants highly rated by the New York Times, those that received an award were more likely to close down than those without one.
A piece in The Times went on to look at the UK’s dining scene, where there have been numerous high-profile closures, Le Gavroche (two stars) and Purnell’s (one) among them. The newspaper’s food editor warned not to conflate correlation with causation – because, for example, Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley left to pursue a TV career. I’d argue closures have nothing to do with Michelin, or any other food guide for that matter, but an ever-disagreeable economic climate. We all know about the cost of bloody living.
And so it worries me when people who enjoy restaurants become excited by the opportunity to do restaurant guides down. Many I speak to say they wouldn’t survive without the reputation or credibility guides afford them. It isn’t only Michelin, but the likes of The Good Food Guide (for transparency, I have been involved in the past), Harden’s (likewise), and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The latter is especially criticised – but it also puts high-spending diners on seats and helps to catapult chefs to global fame.
Restaurant guides have been branching out in recent years, but still focus on fine dining for the most part. The system doesn’t work for everyone. Still, there is always the option to switch up the business model and go casual, which is what a lot of chefs do, post-accolades or before.
Andy Beynon, who founded the London restaurant Behind, won a Michelin star in 2020 after 20 days of trading, which might be a record. He told me: “We wouldn’t survive if it wasn’t for Michelin. It gets you known. It means we’re a destination. We have guests come in from all over the world – the guide works for both business and customer… I worked for 16 years to win a Michelin star. I think we’d lose 30 per cent of our clientele without it. People who dismiss it… well, do they have one? I think there’s a lot of jealousy.”
There is often a lot of brouhaha when a restaurant “hands back” its Michelin star(s). It happens not infrequently: a restaurant in Lucca, Italy, did just that only last week in favour of casual dining. It’s sensible PR. And it is, sometimes, the way, when chefs and restaurateurs feel they are better placed to do business without being bound to the whims of restaurant inspectors or the diktat of a singular entity. Many will remember when Marco Pierre White, the youngest chef to ever win three Michelin stars, stepped away from his restaurant. Then again, he had done it all, and was, by his own admission, “bored”. He could make more money outside of the trappings of Michelin and have a less arduous time of it. Fair enough.
This anti-Michelin rhetoric that crops up among those who have never worked in kitchens, however, seems odd to me. What do any of us really know about the intricacies of hospitality or the everyday workings of restaurants? Why must a university decry an institution, one that has given a lot to a great number of people, on the back of one study?
According to the 2024 Michelin Guide there are just over 200 Michelin-rated restaurants in the UK, the vast proportion (170) with one star, the rest with two and three. A handful have closed in the last year, but then around 2,000 restaurants shut in 2023 alone.
I spoke to a few other chefs about anti-Michelin sentiments off the back of this story. One was Sat Bains, whose eponymous restaurant in Nottingham has had two stars for over a decade.
“It’s an easy thing to do, dismiss Michelin,” Bains told me. “But closures are nothing to do with Michelin. It’s down to business. It’s great having a star but you can’t get complacent. If you start believing your own hype, you’re going to lose the plot.”
Jonny Lake, who earned Trivet in London two stars, said similarly: “Restaurants sometimes ‘hand back’ stars. If that’s what they want to do, fair enough. It doesn’t work for everyone. People move on. But at the end of the day, it’s important to us. It helps our business and that’s that.”
And that is that, isn’t it? Chefs can say what they like about Michelin. Others can discuss it and deliberate. I don’t think anyone should call the guide a “death knell” for the industry.
