God of Tires
How the Michelin Guide locks the world into problematic gastronomy
I think I need to finally go on the record and explain why I talk so much shit about the Michelin Guide. And I admit that I talk a lot of shit. Between my Substack and an impending memoir, I’m beginning to sound like a jilted singer-songwriter writing my magnum opus about the man who did her wrong.1
The Guide didn’t do me wrong. The Guide is just doing what it was destined to do. We had our tryst, it moved on and then it forgot I existed. We had a chance to get back together and I was tempted. But I realized I was no longer the same person. We had gone in different directions. The Guide was wrong for me. And not only that, it was pretty damn toxic. When I finally realized that, I felt ashamed. Not for my personal growth, but for how I had behaved. I had preached the Guide’s miasmic religion for many years. I was its biggest supporter.
The Guide has only become bigger and more influential since last we dated. They’re doing international tours, printing cash and signing corporate sponsorships. The Guide is hotter than fish grease. I’m over here thinking, well, if it makes them happy I guess. But if I’m being honest, I can’t help but rue that most of the world doesn’t get how the Guide really works, who it really is and what profound impact it has on the way we eat.
I assure you this ain’t fermented grapes. I am grateful for finding life outside the purview of awards culture. The last thing I want to do for a living is cook four-hour tasting menus. I have no interest in sidling up to your table to do a caviar dance only to hear you brag about the best glass of D’Yquem you’ve ever had to a woman who’s favorite thing about you is your bank account. All I’ll be able to think about is how I’ve sentenced you to having low-effort sex because of how much dairy we’re about to shove down your face. Sorry (but not sorry?) that you’ll have to tiptoe around the butter-induced balloon of gas in your lower colon.
No thanks.
I’d much rather sit at home and bloviate on my Substack. Y’all can at least consume that content while sitting on the toilet.
The point I’m getting to is that I see the Guide for what it is and that these criticisms aren’t coming from a place of spite. The Guide is emblematic of the descent of our civilization. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that the Michelin Guide is one of the most nefarious agents in reinforcing racial and economic inequality and in causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem. This could be somewhat palatable if it was celebrating truly meaningful art. But these days, the Guide is complicit in rewarding enough artistically bankrupt food to stock a Costco in each major city.
They want you to get the biggest cart you can find and to take a leisurely stroll. Welcome to paradise. Make sure you hit up a spot on the Bib Gourmand, a little bargain hot dog to warm you up.
And I’m telling you, you really need to not get lost in that place. You probably shouldn’t even go in.
For here, there be monsters.
I know that you know but you really need to know that the Michelin Guide is run by a tire company. And you really need to think about how tires are made. Not only do they cause environmental disasters at every stage of their production, life and death cycle, the Guide’s entire raison d'être is to sell as many of these 18-inch catastrophes as the planet will allow. Estimates put it that a Michelin Guide gracing your country will increase their tire sales by about 3% in that region. That’s a lot of unhoused orangutans.
Even worse, and something I’ve never seen anyone mention, is the Michelin Guide’s connection to how the rubber industry started. The systematic harvest of rubber is directly tied to one of the most horrific tragedies in human history; the colonization of the Congo.
If you want to remember how deep the depths of our savagery as a species goes, go ahead and read about the atrocities in the Congo Free State. Enslavement, rape, murder, cannibalism and mutilation abound. The rotten fruits of a colonial mindset. For those who have never had the pleasure of seeing it, this is a photo of Nsala of Wala. He is staring at the severed hand and foot of his five year-old daughter. She and her mother were killed and eaten by a private militia funded by King Leopold II of Belgium.2 The militia left these appendages on his doorstep to remind him of the consequences of failing to meet quota.
When King Leopold II was confronted about the mutilations happening in his colony, which was deemed his private property, he responded,
“Cut off hands—that’s idiotic. I’d cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That’s the one thing I need in the Congo.”
I don’t know how some men can know the shadow of evil but not feel remorse. The Belgian state went to great lengths to destroy evidence of their crimes. But there was too much money at stake. In a private letter to his envoy, King Leopold was recorded as saying;
“I do not want to risk losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake.”
A cake! Of fine pastry flour, marigold eggs, 83% butter and a casual genocide.
Now I know what you’re thinking. That was Belgium. The Michelin Guide was started in France. It’s merely a coincidence that the Congo was colonized in 1885 and that Michelin was founded in 1889 and that the Michelin Guide began in 1900. That’s just unfortunate timing. There must have been some fair trade rubber in the late 19th century when white Europeans still considered Africans subhuman. France surely wasn’t sourcing rubber from their literal neighbor.
Well I regret to inform you that even if that were true there has been no greater affliction to the continent of Africa than the French Empire. It’s funny that Macron claims to be the champion of Pan-Africanism when France and the CIA have coordinated to assassinate dozens of Pan-African leaders since the Cold War. That thought goes down nicely with a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Perhaps a sweetbread drowned in beurre noisette.
How many chefs, restaurateurs, culinary empires, and celebrity chefs grinning on cans of soup have been built on all that blood and rubber? It’s a staggering thought to contemplate. Really makes the case for reparations, doesn’t it? There are trillions of dollars in institutions built on the bones of the Congolese.
The God of Tires smiles at you from behind the crimson cover of the Red Guide. He is benign, chubby, squeezable. He assures you that hidden underneath his blubbery folds is a map to the world’s most wonderful experiences. You will be attended to as if you were royalty.
But maybe that book is colored red to hide the bloodstains.
No one reading this is complicit in the Congo Free State. But the next time you see chefs accepting their three stars, jumping up and down on stage like Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch, maybe think about how all of this started. That chef will become world-famous, sell ghostwritten memoirs and elegantly bound cookbooks. They will gain an all-access pass to never being questioned or doubted again. The Guide’s greatest blessing will make them rich, renowned and respected. And there will still be neocolonialism and outright slavery in the DRC today.
When you think about that usually-white, usually-male chef of European descent at the happiest moment of their career, think about the native Congolese smearing latex onto their bodies to dry it as fast as they could. Peeling off the latex to turn it into rubber tears their skin and hair, it draws blood. But it was their only hope of meeting an impossible quota that kept their family’s lives in the balance. Besides, ripping dried latex off your body may hurt, but not as badly as being whipped by a sjambok.3
I have no doubts that the Michelin Guide’s original integrity was true. But manmade systems can’t maintain infinite growth without consequences. On the journey to generating billions, it’s impossible to maintain brand integrity.
Most of you know how the Guide works. There is a NOC list of former chefs, hoteliers and service professionals that they’ve turned into critics. Their identities are kept secret, the critics never announce themselves when they make reservations, and they are said to spend months, if not years, evaluating the most notable restaurants in the world. Then there’s an annual gala in every city they’ve scouted where they anoint the next generation of gastronomic royalty.4
The Guide is the premier awards brand for the food and beverage industry. They are the Oscars. And yet, as it goes with publicly traded companies, Michelin — the rubber merchant — has to show profit month over month. No matter its cultural heft and supposed artistry, the Guide is still a line on a quarterly report. Even if it operates at a loss for the most valuable tire company in the world, it has to be the number everyone agreed upon at the board meeting.
So the Guide grows. And so do its expenses. Or so we assume. We don’t know because it operates in complete secrecy. Who really knows if they’re maintaining their original intention? Who really knows if restaurants are actually being inspected or they’re simply awarding the restaurants that fit the narrative? How are critics even being compensated? What is their operating budget?
What we do know is that Michelin inspectors are subsidized by boards of tourism across many countries. It is well-known that to get the Michelin birdie to visit your feeder, you have to pony up the cash. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of taxpayer dollars per year. Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, Georgia, British Columbia, Ontario and more to come.
And this has all happened rather rapidly. Chefs are clamoring over themselves to please the critics in the fog. Earning stars is a revenue multiplier. It is understandable to want to do everything you can to win the game. But what does winning the game even mean? Because not only is the evaluation process shrouded in mystery but we’re still talking about entirely subjective criteria.
Secrecy? Check. Subjectivity? Check. A lot of money at stake? Check. Stalwart resistance to transparency? Check. Media controlled narratives? Check.
Sounds like a recently deposed government overtaken by an American-backed warlord! And it sounds like a situation ripe for corruption and uncouth practices.
I think this all started when Michelin paid Accenture to tell them how to make more money. They spent millions on a PowerPoint from a bunch of kids studying for their GMAT to explain what was already obvious.
Dear Michelin,
You have such a powerful and historic brand that you can get entire governments to pay for you to appear.
Sincerely,
Hunter
Once it became about appearance fees the Guide suddenly became a lot more about pay-to-play. The sad part is it wasn’t always like that.
It used to be that earning a single Michelin star was considered a career well spent. A chef may never know if it was going to happen. They just had to make excellence an indefatigable lifelong habit. Becoming a two star chef made you a household name. When your alumni went around the world, your name earned your disciples automatic respect. Becoming a three star chef meant ascension to godhood. It was as if it couldn’t just be about effort alone. One had to have divine inspiration. You had to be Mozart.
These days it’s a bit different. You can have two stars pretty much as soon you open your doors. Especially if you have a good PR company. If the Guide is being paid to be somewhere, how are they going to tell the board of tourism, “Sorry, we didn’t find anything worthy of our criteria”? I’ve made this point before but it really irritates certain chefs. They really don’t like the idea that the bar is now lower. They claim to have known how great they were 6 months after their first service. And I’m going to double down and say you’re absolutely kidding yourself. If you are already at your best shortly after creating your Google profile then you were never all that good to begin with.
I suppose that’s how it goes with human institutions. They start with artistic integrity and noble intentions and then the world slowly corrupts the vision. Money, secret handshakes, little acts of selfishness. What’s a harmless kickback? What’s one little white lie? And then a few decades later the thing is unrecognizable from itself.
The thing is taking money from Sysco so that they can send sales reps deep into your kitchen. They want to convince your chefs to give them a try. It’s hard to describe how much of a perversion it is to see a Michelin plaque delivered off the back of a Sysco truck with the sanitizer and the frozen waffle fries. That would be like hearing Paul McCartney is advocating for more AI music.
The sales rep unveils your award and congratulates you on all of your hard work and success. Their royal blue uniform is eerily alien juxtaposed against the maroon acrylic in their hands. It’s like they’re holding a freshly harvested kidney. Did you know their prices can’t be beat? We’re not all that bad, you know? We source great ingredients from small, local farms. Well, they were small, local farms at least. Up until we economically bullied them into submission by destroying all of their available supply chains. Then when they had to sell their multi-generational land, we gave them a fair market price. So, technically, we source from small, local farms, yes.
“We deliver six days a week and we have a great mobile app!”
No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.
A Michelin star is not just an award. A star has a gravitational pull that drags everyone into its orbit. Its mass increases exponentially with every new city claimed. Its well is so powerful that it has forced a template for success on to the entire restaurant industry.
Let’s look at it from a young chef’s perspective.
A fresh young chef graduates culinary school and finds himself in a rat’s nest of line cooks in Crown Heights. They lie to the landlord and sign the lease with only two tenants, but there are really four of them and a girlfriend that really needs to pitch in for toilet paper. Our hero has rented out a sofa bed with a flimsy plywood partition, pays $1100 a month for the privilege of calling it a bedroom. He’s “fixed” the partition with duct tape after having drunkenly stumbled into the thing half a dozen times by now. He watches porn with one headphone in in lieu of nurturing healthy relationships. Personal embarrassments and a lack of dignity aside, he is ready to become the next great chef. He enlists in a Michelin star institution and starts from the bottom.
He grinds, he works hard, he knows he probably shouldn’t be doing blow on a weekly basis, but he is making some fucking soigné food.
Years go by. The amount of lobsters he’s unceremoniously ripped in half to get ready for lunch service is uncountable. He goes through twelve pounds of butter ever day. He has his eyes set on becoming a sous chef at said great restaurant. Once that’s on his resume, maybe he can become a chef de cuisine or executive chef somewhere. Maybe he can earn a Michelin star from scratch. Then he’ll be ready to open his own Michelin starred restaurant. He doesn’t know the first thing about opening a restaurant, but he drinks in all the data around him.
It appears that you need lots of beautiful plates and stemware, a big wine cellar full of Old World bangers, a sommelier with a college degree they no longer use, and you should definitely serve a tasting menu. Make sure you hire lots and lots of attractive women and dress them in crisp uniforms — do not try to sleep with any of them — use a lot of Japanese ingredients, talk about the farms you work with as much as possible, keep injecting labor into your recipes because more labor equals more refinement and more refinement means the better your chances of getting a star. Name your restaurant some two or three syllable vaguely-European-but-inevitably-nonsensical word.5 And remember; being a hyper-intense knob means you’re passionate. What is a smattering of violence in pursuit of great art? You went through it, so should they.
Our brave hero is ready to venture into the unknown and make his dream a reality. The first dragon on his quest? Apparently he needs an absurd amount of money. Maybe he works as a private chef to some 9-digit hedge fund manager and tries to get money from them. Maybe he leverages every family member’s stock portfolio, maybe he puts himself into ruinous debt. But there’s no getting around it; he’s going to need millions of dollars to make this dream happen. And he’s probably never going to see it again.
If earning the most important award in your industry has an admission price of at least $1 million dollars that will never see any return, that’s a problem. That means only those with the privilege to do such a crazy thing have the opportunity to succeed. I mean Michelin isn’t alone in that. That’s pretty much how our entire society is set up. Pay-to-win. But Michelin has a particularly high bar to entry for what is supposedly a working class craft. And what is obvious is that the more money you spend the more likely you’re going to succeed.
That’s life, I guess. It’ll all be worth it when you post that team photo on Instagram with you hoisting that plaque.6
There aren’t a lot of examples of chefs doing it any differently. You gotta follow the playbook. What other choice do you have? Go to Japan, wash rice for four years and spend another six scaling fish to open an omakase counter as a native Chicagoan? This has been the recipe for success since the French revolution. A meal at Per Se is not a far cry from a banquet in the hall of Louis XV. There is an abundance of unpaid and underpaid labor that is whipped together to produce ostentatious displays of wealth and excess.
That is the truth of two and three star restaurants. A huge pool of labor creates a product for which one man takes the entirety of the credit. Call me crazy but I’m not terribly impressed by your culinary wizardry if you had an endless supply of slave labor at your disposal. I look at Noma the same way I look at every waterway in South Carolina that ends with the word “Cut”. You know why it’s called a Cut? Because enslaved black men literally had to cut a path through the malarial swamp, felling trees and dying in droves to connect trade routes to the canal.
We’ll get to my problems with equating excess to luxury,7 but the Michelin Guide’s very narrow lens through which it defines excellence keeps the restaurant industry echoing the same pattern for success. I think a tasting menu and high-touch service can be a really fun experience, but it’s a problem when it seems to be the only way to get the industry’s most prestigious awards.
It costs millions upon millions of dollars to open a two Michelin star restaurant. There are exceptions but they are few. If there’s one thing that chefs hate talking about it’s where they got the money. It is in those moments they choose to remind everyone of their blue-collar trade and humble beginnings. Of sleeping on a sofa bed while working 70-hour weeks.
Okay, great. Where did you get the money?8
An awards system that has deep roots in imperialism continually rewards those who have most benefitted from it.
I have a lot of respect for sushi chefs and the Japanese approach to work. I admittedly get a little aroused when watching Japanese craftsmen and craftswomen pay an irrational amount of attention to small details. Jiro Dreams of Sushi still hits. I’ve had some life-changing food experiences pressing a body-temperature slice of horse mackerel to my tongue. Part of me wishes I could run an eight seat restaurant in a subway station and just be completely out of my fucking mind about something random like pork knuckles.
But can we all agree that yanking a blackthroat seaperch out of the Pacific Ocean and flying it to New York City the next day is an insane use of resources?
I am no environmental crusader. I wish I could be. I feel guilt every day in knowing I’ve built a career on a creature that has suffered one of the cruelest fates in documented history; the battery farm chicken. But I feel the need to grab you by the shoulder and ask,
“How many Japanese fish can you name?”
Because what you believe to be your level of sophistication is actually you being a participant in a wildly irresponsible supply chain. That’s a lot of carbon emissions just for you to mispronounce kinmedai at your next cocktail party.
We revel in feasting as a species. This behavior isn’t unique to the Western world or Michelin’s sphere of influence. And I’m not telling you to live a monastic lifestyle. But I think we should stop being so impressed with chefs who open tins of caviar, grind up Wagyu cows for burgers and throw every fish head that comes through the door in the trash. Alice Waters had the right idea with starting the locavore movement, she was just the wrong messenger. We didn’t need a hippie witch cooking singular eggs over roaring wood fires telling us to eat local. We needed political will and nutritional science to eliminate food deserts and corporate control over our food systems. But that’s asking a lot of a country that can’t even find the political will to maybe ask folks to cool off for 24 hours before they purchase an AR-15.
The best time to have started reflecting on our consumption habits was the beginning of the 20th century. The second best time is now. None of us are perfect but I will not allow the Michelin Guide the convenience of that shield. Because it isn’t just coincidentally human. It has the vicious appetite of the publicly traded company. They don’t even pretend to care about sustainability anymore with a bullshit carbon offset tax. They have straight up eliminated the only system they had for rewarding a modicum of environmental sustainability.
It all goes back to Versailles. You don’t eat beef shin when you want luxury. You eat the Chateaubriand. Not just the tenderloin of beef but the perfect 8-inch cylinder in the middle of said tenderloin. Vegetables have to be shaped into spheres and diamonds and cubes. Everything else goes into the trash. Chef doesn’t want your peels in his veal stock. Double cream, glace de volaille, sauce Meurette, foie gras. Le nectar de cuisine française!
I’m not asking for a tribunal for past behavior but I’m asking for some reflection on our current state of affairs. Restaurants are an important part of the human experience. We all need to eat and have fun now and again, otherwise, what are we even fighting for? But we need to redefine the experience of eating out. We’re replicating models from before there were lightbulbs. We can find new ways to define luxury and fun without overnighting live king crabs from Norway.9
I poke fun at my peers who are so proud of slathering toro and shima aji and Ligurian olive oil all over their menus. These are delicious things. American food systems could never. I get why they’re on the menu.
But I neither find it conscionable nor terribly creative to serve Australian wagyu and Galician turbot. If Michelin keeps rewarding it, however, the plumes of jet fuel will continue to scream across the sky.
From my vantage point behind the deep fryer, Michelin has been the controlling force on the universal human behavior of eating out. And it hasn’t wielded that power responsibly. I’m sure they count it as a huge success that even the most humble street stall dreams of a Michelin star. But it seems like yet another gatekeeper wanting to put up more fences.
I’m not sure that I’m asking for the dismantling of the system. There are still many things I like about fine dining. And I care deeply about great cooking. There are many people who enjoy deserved success within the Guide’s parameters. I consider many of them friends of mine. I am proud of them. They are good people and they have worked hard to be better than those that have come before.
But it’s hard for me not to look at the whole thing bug-eyed and perplexed. As the inequities of our society slowly choke us to death, all I can do is look at the thing most relevant to my life and question the world it has created. God of Tires, what is your plan for us? Will you deliver us from evil and the valley of unseasoned food?
You could say I have no right to challenge the colossus. What do you know? You fucking fry chicken. And I think back to my younger self. A thinner, meaner, more mentally fraught version of myself. He was an excellent chef, a dauntless leader, had unerring technique and work ethic. He had clarity of purpose. Go for immortality or go home.
I hold a wry smile for that version of myself. He’s kind of funny to reflect on.
He was good at what he did but he was hopelessly myopic and self-interested. This version of myself, a man on the verge of 40 is tired, “lazy” and just wants to sit at home on the couch. And he hopes he can make the world a better place for his children. He couldn’t hack it in a Michelin-starred kitchen anymore but he doesn’t want to. He thinks there are bigger things to concern ourselves with and a different sort of peace to be had that will never be earned on a podium.
And I like that a hell of a lot more.
Can we agree that David Harbour is aggressively average though?
And British investors. Just because the UK is now a crumbled empire that delivers us the annual joy of the Great British Bake Off, let’s not forget that it was once the most violent imperialist in the world.
The sjambok was a rigid whip made from hippopotamus or rhinoceros hide. If native villagers refused to harvest rubber, the official Belgian tariff was to give 20 lashings with a sjambok. It was said that most victims lost consciousness after 25 lashings.
I hear there’s a backroom where there’s a circle jerk with white truffle oil also.
My favorite game is “Michelin-starred restaurant or prescription drug?”
Don’t forget to crop out the Sysco rep.
Which, to be fair to the French, is a human problem, not just a French one. The French are just very good at it.
There are certain demographics that have a much easier time cobbling together millions of dollars to build a restaurant that will likely never make that money back. I don’t want to hit the chop on the bone too hard but I’ll give you a hint; it tends to be the sort that have been the President of the United States 44.5 out of 45 times.
King crab is one of the few creatures that has the misfortune of being shipped internationally while still alive. Had crabs had a few more degrees of consciousness, that would be such a wild ride. “Heyyyyy! Got upgraded to business class? Looks like it’s my lucky day! What’s all that boiling water for?”
I appreciate a good screed but the gratuitous slap at Alice Waters seems churlish and weak.
What an enjoyable read. Food for thought most definitely. I’m sure many people share these same sentiments about the Michelin Guide.