III
LE GUIDE MICHELIN
(and the others)
“C’est une catastrophe,” muttered Pierre Troisgros when he opened the Guide Michelin that fate-charged morning of March 15, 1968. At least that’s how the legend goes today, and why defy a good legend that makes a good point?
The scene was the sidewalk outside the Roanne train station. Pierre had ambled across the place de la Gare to buy the morning paper and pick up a copy of the latest Michelin guide, released to the public that very day. Naturally enough, he had opened the thick little red book at the page for his home town, and there his eyes had fallen upon the very first listing: Les Frères Troisgros—accompanied by three big, fat, beautiful Michelin stars.*
So it had happened. Pierre was seized with a rush of joy and pride, but almost immediately a conflicting emotion surged in to take its place: panic. He was sure they weren’t ready for it. True, the funky days of the Hôtel Moderne, the traveling salesmen, and the table d’hôte had been winding down over the past few years as he and Jean honed their skills and affirmed a steadily higher degree of gastronomic sophistication. The second star that Michelin had awarded them three years earlier had elevated them from the petite noblesse of the trade into the ranks of true gastronomic notables. He and Jean were comfortable on their two-star plateau, and they didn’t even feel envious of Paul Bocuse, their longtime friend from the days chez Point and the brigades in Paris, for the third star that had fallen upon Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or at the same time as the second one had come to Roanne. Paul was the big personality and the big talent, the chef de file (leader) that everyone had always known was destined for the top of the heap. Nothing could stop Paul Bocuse.
But Les Frères Troisgros with three stars? That was something else. This category of restaurants, “worth a special journey” in Michelin-speak, was forever associated in his head with the grandees of the trade, Parisian gastronomic cathedrals like the Tour d’Argent, Claude Terrail’s high-altitude palace dominating the Seine and Notre Dame; or Maxim’s, midway between place de la Concorde and place de la Madeleine, the poshest hashhouse on the face of the earth; or the beautiful, understated Grand Véfour, deep in the somber dignity of the Palais Royal gardens near the Louvre; or Lassere, just off the Champs Elysées, with its host of lackeys and footmen and its spectacular opening roof. There were only a dozen or so three-star restaurants in all of France, and now the former Hôtel Moderne was among them. No, this was folly. The entire kitchen staff of Les Frères Troisgros consisted of just Jean and himself, a pâtissier, a second to back them up at the old coal-fired stove—and the apprentices, seven snotty, ignorant kids. Hell, the brigade at Maxim’s in Paris, where he had worked before Jean-Baptiste yanked him back to Roanne, counted forty professionals. Pierre shuddered.
These past few years in Roanne had been enjoyably hectic, but theirs was still a small-town, family-style operation. What with wives and sisters and the aunt, there were ten Troisgros working in the restaurant—“the gypsy caravan,” they called themselves—and despite the squabbles that sometimes arose among the women, the years had been both productive and rewarding. Jean and Pierre had timidly borrowed enough from a local bank to make the first kitchen improvements since the Hôtel Moderne became Les Frères Troisgros, but it was still a cubbyhole compared to the “real” three-star places. Certainly the brothers were confident that their finest and most pricey specialties could rival any restaurant in France from the point of view of pure cuisine—their poached turbot with a caviar sauce, their grilled lobster à la cancalaise, and their justly famous escalope de saumon à l’oseille, the salmon filet with sorrel sauce that was destined to be imitated a million times but still remain forever associated with the name Troisgros the way a tarted-up tournedos is inevitably associated with Rossini.
Withal, the relative simplicity of their dining room, the bar where locals still dropped by to drink a pastis, the unadorned foie gras terrine and the plate of smoked country ham still listed among the menu’s entrées* were reminders that the simpler old days had not yet entirely disappeared. What insane degrees of sophistication would be expected of them now, and what sort of snobby new clients would they have to cater to? Pierre shook his head. This was definitely worrisome.
“Don’t worry,” Jean-Baptiste told the brothers when they gathered to confer about the stunning news. He sounded exactly like a football coach giving a pep talk. “Just keep it up and do what you’ve always been doing. Don’t change anything in the way you work. If Michelin gave you three stars, it means you’re worth three stars.”
Voilà—end of story. The Michelin oracle had spoken, and no one disputed the oracle, not even Jean-Baptiste.
The position that le Guide Michelin held, the power it wielded, and the respect it enjoyed were unique in France, and, indeed, in the restaurant world in general. Nothing else came even close in comparison. From its beginning as a pocket-sized compendium of addresses and useful motoring information, the Michelin had evolved with the years into a secular symbol of professionalism and rectitude, one of the rare bits of their civilization to which this deeply skeptical and suspicious people willingly accorded their full confidence, untainted by the suggestions of conspiracy that color their regard for almost every other aspect of daily existence. For more than one hundred years now the guide has been sailing through the choppy waters of the hotel-restaurant world at the same stately pace, a constantly reassuring presence in an imperfect world where politicians are probably crooked, spouses surely faithless, and labor unions perpetually on the verge of making life impossible by going out on strike.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the guide, or to understand the pressure that its presence exerts on chefs—and, in particular, how deeply Bernard Loiseau would be feeling that pressure as he scrabbled and fought his way up the ladder—without taking the measure of what it is and how it reached the pinnacle on which it sits so regally today. It is a sobering thought that if this happy-go-lucky, somewhat feckless son of an auvergnat traveling salesman turned into a passionately devoted professional almost overnight, plunged into risks that normally constituted persons would have considered foolhardy, indebted himself up to the top of his toque, and, undeviatingly following a self-imposed ideal, built an astonishingly successful career out of thin air—it was all for the love of le Michelin and the stars that it sprinkles down upon those happy few whom it deems worthy. More poignant yet is a second thought: if he took his life, it was also, fundamentally, because of Michelin. Not that it was Michelin’s fault—far from it—but simply because Michelin was there, like Mount Everest, like Papa, like God. And all of this proceeded from something that had begun as a gimmick, a mere marketing ploy for peddling tires.
It is nicely fitting, too, that the Michelin story, like that of Bernard Loiseau, should have begun in Clermont-Ferrand. The saga of the guide sprang from the fertile brain and public relations genius of young André Michelin (1853–1931), scion of a Clermont family that owned a workshop producing rubber balls and miscellaneous agricultural machinery. He was a polytechnicien, a Paris-trained engineer, this André, but just as much as his technical skills, it was his faculty for attracting attention and currying customer loyalty that set the little Michelin shop on the road to becoming the colossus that it is today: 120,000 employees worldwide, neck and neck with Goodyear for number one in the manufacture and distribution of tires.
Although it was an Englishman, Robert William Thomson, who invented the pneumatic tire in 1845 (he called it an “aerial wheel”) and another one, John Boyd Dunlop, who first applied it to bicycles in 1888 by gluing a rubber tube onto a wheel rim, it remained for André Michelin and his younger brother, Edouard (1859–1940) to find the obvious key for making the damn things practical: a tire and inner tube that could be wrestled off and back onto the rim without all the mess and fuss of the Dunlop gluing process (three hours for repairing a leak and a full night for drying the glue). The Michelin brothers received a patent for their bright idea in 1891, but the public was reluctant to accept the ridiculous idea of rolling on air even after a bike equipped with Michelin tires beat 209 other competitors in the Paris–Brest–Paris race that very year. Determined to get his point across and not overly concerned with the ethics of his method, André organized a Clermont–Paris race the following year, stationed himself ahead of the riders, seeded the road with pointy little nails, and was rewarded with 244 flats. As he had anticipated, the papers reported at length on the ease and rapidity of the repairs that the riders carried out themselves on the roadside. A year later, ten thousand Frenchmen were riding on Michelin tires.
By 1894, Michelin was manufacturing tires for carriages and automobiles—there were two or three hundred of the outlandish contraptions in France by then, and they struck André as a promising development. Year after year he entered cars in various races, winning a few and losing a few, but mostly beating the drum for the excellence of the pneumatiques Michelin with which they were equipped. Engaging some of the best-known affichistes of the moment, André turned out a glorious series of posters—the fin de siècle equivalent of TV spots—that infallibly appealed to the male of the species, who of course did all the buying and driving in those days, by mixing speed with the thrill of danger. “The rail vanquished by Michelin tires!” cried the headline of a breathtaking scene where a begoggled pilot gripping a huge wooden steering wheel careened around a corner in an automotive monster as a locomotive labored over a trestle in the background. Other posters emphasized practicality and thrift (Michelin tires “drank” obstacles) and even a little suggestion of sex, in the person of a gorgeous nymph gracing an allegorical “wheel-of-fortune” poster. With print runs of up to 100,000, the Michelin posters served as interior decorating for countless garages and shops not only in France but throughout Europe, because André had them printed in seventeen languages, including Russian.
It was one of these early drumbeating exercises that created the Michelin Man (the “Bibendum”), the tubby dummy made of tires who went on to become one of the most famous and successful corporate symbols of all time—one whose corpulence, fittingly enough, suggests an association with gastronomic matters, and who continues today to appear liberally within the pages of the red guide. André and Edouard were visiting a big commercial fair in Lyon in 1911 when, passing by the company’s stand, they came upon a stack of tires of different dimensions, bulging out in the middle and tapering upward. “Add arms and legs and you’ve got a man,” remarked Edouard, and quicker than you could say Jacques Robinson, André passed the idea to Marius Rossillon, one of his star illustrators. With that, the Michelin Man was born.
But why the name “Bibendum”? Because Rossillon’s first poster in his honor depicted a surrealistic vision of a pneumatic banquet with a hale, unmarked Michelin Man, cigar in one hand and a huge goblet in the other, standing at a dinner table to make a toast. In the goblet lay a selection of the finest tire destroyers, a cocktail of nails, broken glass, and sharp shards of metal, and the Michelin Man was saying “Nunc est bibendum!”—pop Latin for “Now is the time to drink”—in the sense of swallowing the bitter pill. On either side of Bibendum cowered the blanched, terrified faces of “Tire X” and “Tire Y,” demoralized, scruffed up, and already three-quarters flat, while the accompanying caption cheerily announced that Michelin tires “drank” obstacles. It was perfect, one of those inspired images—funny enough to be sympathetic but clear enough to make the point—that appeal to the public and stick in the memory. Rossillon had created the corporate equivalent of a Snoopy or a Mickey Mouse.
Bibendum evolved with the years, ditching the cigar when it no longer symbolized success and power, his silhouette becoming simpler and more cartoonlike, and the multiple layers of skinny old tires giving way to the dozen or so fatter ones of modern appearance. But he still inspires the consumer loyalty so dear to André’s heart. European truckers in particular fiercely identify with Bibendum, with whom they share ample tummies, the badge of their sedentary work, and apparently feel a pride of kinship in his fearless, always-optimistic character. His plastic effigy bolted to the roof of a semi’s cab is as much a sign of the brotherhood of the road on this side of the pond as the glistening silver air horns of the truckers’ American cousins. The more demonstrative drivers, especially Italians and Spaniards, frequently sport Michelin Men in pairs, lit up from the inside at night. It is unbeatable free advertising, and it must drive Goodyear, Pirelli, Dunlop, and all the other competitors wild with envy. To make matters even more galling, Michelin doesn’t even give the Bibendums (Bibenda?) away—the truckers have to buy the fetishes with which they advertise the company.
Having proven that it was possible to roll on air, the inventive André turned his energies to ensuring that as many people as possible did this. From the turn of the century on, he promoted not so much the tire as the entire concept of motoring. By helping to make driving ever easier, more attractive, and rewarding, he reasoned, he would encourage the industry to build more cars and, ipso facto, order more tires. Thus was born the idea for the red guide.
André sprang his big surprise at Easter, 1900. Motoring had developed to a very considerable degree over the six years that he had been manufacturing car tires, and the brotherhood of chauffeurs (or engineers, as they were also sometimes known) was ready for a handy and practical promotional stunt like this. Clearly marked “not for sale,” the first Guide Michelin was filled with ads and offered gratis.* The first two print runs give an idea of how the auto industry was burgeoning: from 35,000 in 1900 to 50,000 in 1901.
“This work appears with the century,” André wrote when he released the first edition of the guide. “It will last as long.” It sounded vainglorious at the time, but it turned out that he was being too modest. (There’s a nice parallel to be made with another similarly colored opus of the same rough dimensions, Chairman Mao’s little red book of communistic homilies. Printed in millions—perhaps billions—more copies than the Michelin, Machiavellian in intent and murderous in influence, it has already been relegated to the dustbin of history, while André’s eminently peaceable inspiration is going stronger than ever.) André’s first guide, about the dimensions of a small, fat airmail envelope, was entirely in what has come to be recognized as Michelin’s style: 575 pages on thin biblelike paper, listing, from A to Z, the towns whose resources in hotels and garages would be of interest to motorists. In the best Cartesian manner of the French educational system, it opened with a didactic 58-page presentation that could be entitled Motoring 1A, covering every subject from the advantages of pretty roads over boring ones, to correspondences of inner tubes and valves for different sizes of hubs, and, of course, the proper method of pumping up a tire, fixing a flat, or checking a leaky valve.
Most of the gas depots Michelin listed were not garages but general stores or grocers that sold cans of the stuff, and it did not fail to point out that both saddlers and cobblers were usually skilled at repairing blown tires. Many of the symbols of today’s guide were already in use, including the asterisklike stars. In those early days, however, they represented hotels only. There was no listing for restaurants alone, presumably because travelers generally ate in the hotels where they spent their nights. The stars signified hotels offering the room, three meals with wine, plus the service “and the candle” for more than 13 francs (***); 10 to 13 francs (**); and less than 10 francs (*). There were three symbols to indicate which kind of gas the hotel sold and one (a black diamond shape) to indicate that the place was equipped with a darkroom for amateur photographers. In 1901, André added the magic initials “W.C.” to his symbol list, indicating that the establishment possessed at least one of those ultramodern apparatuses, the flush toilet. (W.C. stood for that good old French term water closet.)
Symbols are Michelin’s passion, trademark, and besetting sin. They have grown in number and complication over the years and with changing technology, but there is always a logical explanation for their presence, every last one of them. By using symbols instead of page-consuming texts, Michelin is able to stuff an extraordinary amount of information into a workable number of pages that is understandable to any traveler, whatever language he or she speaks. Even so, the 2004 guide counts 1,824 pages, covering some five thousand different towns and cities and, within them, some nine thousand hotels and restaurants.
This is only a small selection of France’s total resources in hotels and restaurants, of course, most of which possess no stars at all. But their simple inclusion in the guide means that Michelin has been by there and approved them as worthy of dispensing beds and nourishment. The more ambitious ones, Michelin reasons, will work hard enough to raise their standards to starred level and join the trade’s aristocracy. With their distance and mileage charts, their regularly updated figures on population, and their useful phone numbers and city maps, Michelin’s coverage of the country* is so extensive and clear that during the Second World War both German and American armies pirated the guide and issued copies to frontline officers for navigating through urban areas. (The U.S. version was stamped FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.) Nor is it only military types who pillage the information that the Michelin people gather so diligently; it is well known that certain competing guides and food writers use the Michelin as the best and most reliable data base for mining the names and addresses that they do not have the staff to gather themselves.
It was in 1933 that the red guide’s most spectacular innovation burst upon the world of gastronomy: countrywide restaurant ratings. When the previous star system had represented only levels of price, it was a handy reference for the pocketbook and nothing more. At various times, Michelin had toyed with special ratings for restaurants, but it was not until 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, that they shifted the stars from price indicators to quality judgments of restaurants throughout France: one star, “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars, “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars, “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”
Worth a special journey—imagine. It was exciting and intriguing, and it changed everything. Michelin had started something very much like a revolution. Thenceforward, gourmet motorists would seriously contemplate firing up the Hispano Suiza or the Clément-Talbot to drive—and on those old prewar roads, too, before anybody had ever heard of high-speed throughways—to Bordeaux for Le Chapon Fin, or down to the Mediterranean at Beaulieu for La Réserve, or across to Alsace for the Hôtel de France, in Moosch. Or, indeed, to Vienne, Valence, or Saulieu, where gastronomy’s Holy Trinity thrived. But that was just the point: Michelin brought masses of people, first from within France and then from all over the world, not only to Parisian palaces but to insignificant little country burgs as well, where gifted chefs had settled for one reason or another and were doing spectacular things with local products.
André was dead and gone by then, but the Service du Tourisme that he had founded was already turning out the wonderfully clear road maps and the green touring guides, heavily pedagogical in tone (convinced, as the French are, that you cannot appreciate the Chartres cathedral if you don’t know what an architrave is, or a tympanum or a squinch) that continue today to sell by the millions of profitable units. But the star of the show, the one that got all the press attention, was always the red guide to hotels and restaurants—the public’s darling.
How clever were the Michelin brothers? From deep within the volcanic heartland of shabby old Clermont-Ferrand, they had peered straight into the depths of the French psyche. They knew that every Frenchman worth his beret and baguette considered himself a world-class expert on just about everything, but especially on cuisine; they knew that every Frenchman was a born talker who loved to expatiate on his universal knowledge; they knew that from his tenderest childhood this same Frenchman had been raised with a reverence for les belles lettres and the elegant, egregiously affected forms of expression honed over centuries by the royal courts; and he considers that he manipulates these belles lettres rather better than most, if he does say so himself.
In short, André and Edouard knew that the French love to sound off, so they stroked the national ego by turning them into consultants—collaborateurs—for the guide: slipped into the back pages of each book they sold was an official Michelin report sheet and an envelope for mailing it in to headquarters. Anyone who felt strongly enough about the meal he had just consumed was encouraged to put pen to paper and tell the Service du Tourisme about it, at any length he wished. “One hundred thousand readers, 100,000 informers,” they exulted, and they didn’t even pay for the informers’ stamps. It was a terrific piece of marketing, and although the numbers never did quite add up as epically as André and Edouard had originally hoped, the Service du Tourisme still sifts through some twenty-five thousand letters a year. They take them seriously to the extent that several repeated references to the same innovation, change, or failing can indicate something worth watching, but they also know that, professionally speaking, most eaters are gastronomic incompetents—and that letters can be faked, prompted, or even written by the restaurateur himself. Although Michelin will never admit it, the main function of the letter system is to flatter those who buy their guide. The mere suggestion of a guide whose judgments really are based upon letters from readers sends the Service du Tourisme into tremors of restrained auvergnat hilarity.
Who’s in, who’s out? With the appearance of the new star system, the ritual question shot through the gastronomic grapevine every year around Easter time. If developments in the one-star and two-star categories were always worthy of interest, the promotions and demotions among the three-stars aroused a continual stream of learned commentary: Which were the best restaurants in all of France (and therefore the world)? How, exactly, did you draw such judgments? Were they always justified? Very rapidly, egged on by media comment, the French were debating Michelin’s selections with the same passion that Americans lend to the relative merits of football teams, and English punters to the upcoming racing selections.
Since those early days, the three-star debate has become a national institution, an annual occurrence as predictable as the summer solstice, and a surefire story for every newspaper, magazine, and TV talk show. The lucky chef who is promoted to three stars becomes an instant celebrity, and the economic fallout for his restaurant approximates a big hit on the lottery, with clientele and profits increasing anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent. It is a tremendous professional honor, the field marshal’s baton of the trade, and everybody knows it, too; suddenly the same banks that had been niggling over loans come nuzzling the chef with warm, gushy kisses. No other accolade from any other guide or individual critic has the same rocket-motor effect as three Michelin stars. It is unique. This and this alone was the motivating force that drove Bernard Loiseau for the last thirty-five years of his life as he passed through the professional steps of apprentice to employee to partner to trendsetting chef de cuisine and finally to the lofty status of chef d’entreprise, the first cook in history to take his business onto the stock market, charging straight into international stardom and the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
The pendant to the triumph of winning the third star is, of course, its loss. It is the nightmare of every top chef and restaurateur, because it represents not only a certain plunge in profits but a public reprimand and humiliation that call into question everything that he has lived for professionally, like a respected officer having his rank and insignia ripped off before the troops and being degraded to the rank of ordinary soldier. French newspapers have reported innumerable testimonials over the years of chefs reacting in shock, sorrow, and anger after being blindsided by Michelin’s swift sword. None expressed the sentiment more eloquently than Marc Meneau, who soared with the Michelin to the wealth and celebrity of three stars for the personalized cooking he invented in his L’Espérance in Saint-Père de Vézelay. Stunned speechless by the loss of his third star in 1999, he hesitated, searching for the right word. “A bereavement,” he finally said.*
When the chef of the grand old Lapérouse in Paris heard similar bitter news, he cried: “C’est Waterloo!” Alain Zick went farther. Chef of Le Relais de Porquerolles in Paris, he was demoted from one star to none in March 1966. In October, he shot himself dead. So astonishing was his gesture, and so compounded by other personal and financial problems, that the world of gastronomy in general, and the Michelin brass in particular, wrote it off as a one-time freak event that could never recur. Never.
Michelin’s amazing sway over the world of French restaurants took a while to build. Every new undertaking requires a certain breaking-in period, and at the start it looked as if the Service du Tourisme people themselves didn’t quite realize what they were getting themselves into. The guide went through a good deal of backing and filling in the early years, the sure sign that no one had quite figured out the standards for the Jovian judgments they were called on to deliver. The somewhat excessive three-star crowning of twenty-three restaurants in 1933, for example, was immediately followed in 1934 with the abrupt demotion of nine of them—bloodbath! Later editions would see a restaurant enter one year, be kicked back out the next, only to be reinstated just a year later. Feverish haste of that sort smacked suspiciously of amateurism—a most unseemly contrast with the lofty pretensions of le style Michelin. But by the 1939 edition things had settled into a dignified pace and, with it, a more carefully restricted selection of fourteen restaurants at the top level. Then the war came, and everything froze. There would be no new Guide Michelin until 1945.
Plucky as ever, the Service du Tourisme did what it could during the war for a society virtually bereft of cars and fuel, by trying to interest bikers in an ephemeral Guide du Cyclotourisme, but it was a poor and makeshift thing. Restaurants kept going as best they could, showing a glum official face of rutabaga, cabbage, and potato to the occupying Germans while squirreling away black-market goodies for their regular French customers. Pierre Troisgros retains a clear memory today of steaks and chops hidden in the ceiling and behind wall panels of the Parisian restaurants where he worked in the forties, at about the same time as fifteen-year-old Paul Bocuse was helping to slaughter pigs and calves led down into the dark, subterranean confines of the Lyonnais restaurants where he was learning the basics of the trade.
It was only after the war that the guide’s editors found their marks and brought the operation to today’s level. Beefing up its editorial staff and hiring new blood, they developed the specialized corps of professional inspectors that are its pride and glory and defining difference from all the others in the guide business. It was slow-going, though, because for several years the country remained on its economic knees. Rationing was still in force and the food supply and distribution network did not return to prewar levels until 1951. Michelin waited, therefore, until that year to crown its first postwar batch of three-star restaurants. They were only seven of them: the Café de Paris, Lapérouse, and the Tour d’Argent in Paris; Le Père Bise in Talloires; La Mère Brazier in Lyon; La Pyramide in Vienne; and La Côte d’Or in Saulieu.
From that point on, the Michelin Machine was in high gear, and it hasn’t missed a beat since. The inspectors are at the heart of it. They’re a legendary crew, les inspecteurs, a tight-lipped bunch of anonymous incorruptibles who eat their way through France every year like caterpillars doggedly destroying a leaf, munching along the grid lines of a master plan drawn up by their bosses in Paris. Disappearing for a week or two on their tournées to hotels and restaurants, they return to the Service du Tourisme in Paris just long enough to file their reports, pick up the next assignment, and trudge back to their cars. (It’s always by car, of course—until they start rolling on tires, Michelin will always view trains and planes with sovereign contempt.) Contrary to a common assumption, the inspector’s job is neither fun nor easy. They have been hired to work, not to enjoy themselves, and not everybody can stick it out. “The monks of gastronomy,” the inspectors are frequently called, and everything about them reflects the industrious, humorless auvergnat reserve that has forever been the mark of the Michelin man or woman. Twice a day they must write reports covering lunch and dinner, but that’s just the easy part of the grind. There are hotels to visit, rooms to inspect, prices to note—more reports, always more reports. Not just items to tick off: full reports. Clermont-Ferrand expects value for its money.
How many inspectors are there? Nobody knows, and the Service du Tourisme enjoys nothing more than tantalizing journalists with hints, suggestions, and innuendos, while never delivering any real information. Over the years that I have been following the Michelin operation, I have known four editors-in-chief of the guide, and naturally I asked each of them the magic question. The first two—André Trichot and Bernard Naegellen—replied with the same maddening, coquettish phrase: “A certain number.” Derek Brown, the Englishman (that was a surprise) who succeeded Naegellen, danced around it with a comely pirouette that rendered further enquiry pointless: “Let’s say it’s our little secret.” Jean-Luc Naret, the latest boss, is rather more communicative, but the question pains him as much as it did his predecessors.
That’s Michelin for you—take it or leave it. Such is the power of this deliberately maintained mystery, though, that much speculation goes far astray. Some naïve wire service writers have been led to report as many as a hundred inspectors in France alone, but anyone who does a little basic math about budget consequences will see that this is wildly off base. Still, that magic figure of one hundred does frequently float around the Michelin rumor shop. Derek Brown himself, in the wake of a miniscandal that erupted in February 2004 when an inspector was fired for revealing in-house secrets, spoke publicly of a hundred persons authorized to judge restaurants for all eight of the Europe-wide guides, but his deliberately vague phrasing suggested the possibility that this figure could include office editorial staff filling in as temporary inspectors from time to time. Brown further hinted of a platooning system allowing a certain number of inspectors to be shifted from country to country where and when they might be needed (presumably as publication deadlines approached). Later, in conversation with me, he revised that figure down to seventy, Europe-wide.
“In my time there were seven* of us,” René Gerbeau confided. Gerbeau is one of those rarest of animals, a Michelin man—or, rather, an ex-Michelin man—who breaks the company omertà and talks openly about the job. A restaurant inspector in the booming sixties, he retains vivid memories today of long, lonesome days on the road, solitary meals, and endlessly repetitive afternoons tramping up and down hotel stairs checking on rooms. After several years of the routine, an overpowering lassitude set in and finally drove him to quit.
“It was no way to make a living. The salary was pretty poor to begin with, just about what a midlevel office clerk would earn, and they were unbelievably tight with money—we had to justify our expenses down to every last sou. We always worked alone. As it happened, I had just been married before I took the job, but there was no question of the company paying for phone calls home. They wouldn’t even pay for our laundry. We were supposed to get it done at our own expense when we got home. If you needed a new pencil they wouldn’t issue you one unless you turned in the stub of the used one. That’s the auvergnats for you. That’s Michelin.”
A penny’s a penny, as everyone knows, and the tightfisted descendants of André and Edouard Michelin counted them as lovingly as Ebenezer Scrooge ever did. Company old-timers still remember the days when office workers were expected to use envelopes twice, turning the used ones inside out for a second life on the other side. Withal, Gerbeau cannot restrain a grudging sense of admiration for his ex-employers, because the famous Michelin probity really was there—it wasn’t legend or PR fakery.
“I had graduated from hotel school, so I was qualified for the job, but their main criterion for hiring me was my moral value. I had to give them all sorts of references, of course, and they backed that up by interviewing the people whose names I gave. They even interviewed the concierge of my apartment building to make sure I had a reputation for upstanding morality. I suppose they knew there would be temptations—and there were, too. Sometimes, after I had identified myself, restaurateurs and hoteliers would hint around about maybe rewarding me, one way or another, but they were always frightened to come right out and say it. We would never have gone for it, anyway. We believed in the system—we really were incorruptible.”
If Gerbeau finally found the plodding, solitary regimen of the job to be soul-destroying he managed to salvage a few memories of a change of pace that broke up the tedium. The most exciting occurred after he had finished and paid for a meal in a provincial restaurant that had been relieved of its lone star the year before. Flashing his Michelin ID, he asked to see the boss—who arrived on the run from the kitchen with an enormous butcher’s knife in his hand. “Ah, Michelin, is it?” he growled. “Happy to see you. My chiffre d’affaires is down sixty percent since you took away my star.”
Inventing some appropriate niceties to mumble, Gerbeau slunk away without further damage, but it was only more evidence that there is no trade where Latin passions run as high as the creative small-business world of cooking. André Trichot, white-haired patriarch of the guide’s retired directors, recalled a demoted chef in Lyon who advertised his fury by displaying at his front entrance a Michelin tire with a knife stuck through it.
It was an odd kind of existence, the life of the Michelin monk, a paradoxical mix in which power lay cheek by jowl with submission and luxury, and lobster contrasted with abject thrift. The Michelin hierarchy expected the inspector to be a thoroughgoing organization man, clean shaven, dressed just so, dutifully following his route and writing his reports, Mr. Average, modestly going about his duty. No fashion flairs, no sticking out, no girlfriends, no drawing attention to himself—there’s no room for rugged individualists chez Michelin. In Gerbeau’s day, the standard vehicle for the inspectors was the ridiculous little 2CV, the Citröen deux-chevaux with the corrugated tin body and the baby carriage suspension. No swanking it when you arrive in a heap like that.
Ah, but each inspecteur had a little bit of Clark Kent in him, a secret lightning bolt hidden behind his namby-pamby demeanor: Superman’s power to award or remove stars. To this day, Gerbeau cherishes the memory of chugging up to the grand entrance of the very hoity-toity Hôtel Négresco in Nice and barely getting the time of day from the chasseurs, voituriers, and assorted doormen in their Fredonian generals’ uniforms as he alighted like Monsieur Hulot from his popping, vibrating little car. He had a swell dinner in the monumental dining room, spent the night, ate his breakfast—and then flashed his Michelin card. This time he had the whole crew, including the hotel manager, standing at attention as he drove away. If they had thought it might help, they would have been blowing kisses at him, too.
For all the submission to behavioral norms that the company expected of him, Gerbeau was pleasantly surprised by the extent of Michelin’s loyalty to its men in the field. “Our judgments made the law,” he told me. “Once I took away a star from a restaurant whose owner had some very highly placed political friends—all the way up in the president’s office. It finally came down to a standoff between the Élysée Palace and me, and the company backed me all the way. The restaurant didn’t get its star back.”
But whatever happens, Michelin will always be Michelin. One day the company will show magnificent support like that, and the next, it will pull a stunt like the business with the experimental tires. “Clermont-Ferrand had come up with a new design for a tire they wanted to test, so they used the inspectors,” said Gerbeau. “The damn things kept coming off the rims, and we had to complain that it wasn’t the inspectors’ job to be guinea pigs. They never did manufacture those tires.”
Gerbeau left the company soon thereafter, relieved to be off the gastronomic treadmill but still happy to have lived the experience of a legendary job, even if its reality did not quite match up with its romantic folklore. Apart from affording him an intimate knowledge of French geography for all the thousands of miles covered in his 2CV, he can flatter himself today as a world-class expert on the cooking and presentation of veal kidneys, a favorite dish that he ordered again and again while on tournée. And when he dines at friends’ houses, the hostess is always afraid of him.
It was a rare stroke of luck for me to have discovered Gerbeau, and even rarer, I think, that he agreed to reminisce in some detail about the work of the inspectors, because Michelin hates having the least bit of information leaking out of the inner sanctum. To say that Michelin has a penchant for secrecy is like saying cormorants have a penchant for fish. With its multitude of inventions and clever manufacturing processes, the company has always lived by the assumption that the entire world is scrambling to get into its corporate pants and steal its secrets.
Michelin defends against industrial espionage by color-coding its work areas and employees’ blouses—you work in one color and you stay there—and maintains a perpetual vigilance against transgressors that is just one notch removed from paranoid schizophrenia. Everyone in France has heard the story of how General De Gaulle was quickly shooed from one meaningless vista to another during a presidential visit to Clermont-Ferrand in the sixties, and even an official German delegation, Michelin people swear today, was similarly flimflammed when they had France at their mercy after the 1940 armistice.
Secrecy? “We prefer to say discretion,” a company spokesman told me a few years ago with that inimitable, ineffable Michelin complacency behind the bland company smile. “Let us say we have our way of doing things.”
With manufacturing, so it is with the guide’s procedures. Standard routine for the inspectors is to arrive at restaurants unannounced, but if a reservation is required, they call in like any other customer and have a supply of credit cards bearing no company name. They eat, pay—and only then flash their Michelin ID card for a visit to the kitchen and a talk with the terrified chef and proprietor. But restaurateurs can’t even count on that. Just as frequently, the Michelin man simply disappears as anonymously as he had arrived, to do his report in the secrecy of his hotel room.
The inspectors are the joy and the sorrow of French restaurateurs, because Michelin gives and Michelin takes away with the same inscrutable despotism. At times their verdicts strike ordinary non-Michelin mortals as unjust and wrongheaded but, like a zealous young traffic cop issuing parking tickets, they have come to their conclusions and they are impervious to whining, charm, or persuasion. So rectitudinously bloody-minded are the inspectors when they flash their cards that restaurateurs instinctively flee from even the thought of maybe offering them a free meal, a nice bottle of wine or, heaven forbid, a bribe—in that way lies dismissal and disgrace.
But when is a bribe a bribe, and when is it mere professional courtesy? That’s a big question in France, one that is loaded with tricky ethical nuances. For Michelin, the answer is simple: Anything—anything at all—more than the normal relationship of a paying customer to a provider of a commercial service is out, anathema, verboten. The Guide Michelin pays its way, accepts no advertising in its pages, is beholden to no one, and can preen and strut: pure as the driven snow. But of course that’s easy, because the Service du Tourisme is backed by the mighty financial muscle of a great multinational corporation with a huge PR budget. Lesser guides or newspapers, with little or no such financial backing, aren’t so lucky, and the stark fact of life is that having several employees pay for two meals a day in fine restaurants is ruinously expensive in itself, let alone the costs of salaries, road expenses, and printing and distributing the final product.
The result is this: Almost without exception, foodie journalists can eat for free in French restaurants, and few of them fail to take advantage of the custom and declare their status. On the surface this sounds rotten—to Anglo-Saxon observers, anyway—but there is an implicit trade-off, because everyone knows that a halfway decent article in a newspaper, or a nice paragraph in a guide (even if it isn’t the Michelin), can fill a restaurant with customers overnight. Invariably, then, journalists and guide critics are not just tolerated by the trade, but actively sought out, pampered, and praised. Professional courtesy, they call it. Theater critics don’t pay for their tickets, either. If everyone was bound by the chilly, virginal rules that reign in the auvergnat kingdom founded by André and Edouard, Le Guide Michelin would be in a position of quasi-monopoly.
The nub of the matter, then, the really slippery part, is the interpretation of the trade-off: one meal against an article or the paragraph in the guide—fine, no sweat. But how about several meals afterward, and maybe with family and friends? Restaurateurs often feel obliged to go along with an ongoing regimen of free chowdowns for hungry journalists who don’t have the delicacy to back off. What Fernand Point did out of native generosity, friendship, and a big heart becomes for these restaurateurs a finely calculated business equation.
Worse yet—and here the trade-off slips into downright racketeering—are the guides and semirespectable publications that go much further than free meals, by taking money (either directly or in the form of expensive ads in the publication) to give restaurants a favorable review. Although impossible to prove in a court of law, it is common knowledge that they exist and that it happens. And not only in France.
In short, the Michelin people have it made. Since they never have to get their hands dirty with the kinds of sordid commercial details that govern everybody else, theirs is the only guide that the French trust entirely without afterthoughts of kickback and payola. And now with the Church getting irrelevant, wine getting sugared, and one hundred thousand supermarket Santas chortling a million plastic ho-ho-hos, the Michelin inspector is just about the last symbol of absolute virtue that the French can cling to. Restaurateurs believe in them, anyway—one hundred percent.
“A light to guide us,” Alain Chapel told me years ago when I asked him to characterize the guide. “The Michelin spirit means quality in the tiniest details.” Coming from a mere mortal this would be impressive enough, but Chapel, who worked himself to death in 1990 at the age of fifty-two, is universally viewed with awe in the profession as one of the greatest culinary magicians ever to hold three stars. His even more famous elder, Paul Bocuse, with a long lifetime of experience behind him, is not afraid to be more categorical still: “Michelin is the only guide that counts.”
Rich, powerful, and adulated, top chefs enjoy the prestige of true celebrity status, but once a year they shrink to the size of frightened schoolkids when they perform a rite firmly cemented in gastronomic folklore: the traditional pilgrimage to 46 avenue de Breteuil, behind the gold dome of the Invalides in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. There, in the austere high-windowed, eight-storied headquarters of the Service du Tourisme, they bend a knee and, symbolically, at any rate, kiss the pope’s ring.
Rare is the chef who refuses to join the procession, because the single most dreadful event that can befall his business, apart from death or paralysis, is the loss of whatever he possesses in the way of stars. Making the pilgrimage cannot guarantee the stars will remain, but it can’t hurt, either. Maybe the oracle will deliver a few hints, point to tendencies, give a wink here and a nudge there. You never know. And the mere fact that you have taken the time and trouble to come in shows how sérieux you are. Not even Paul Bocuse, the Emperor himself, a man who has been everywhere, met everyone, done everything—not even he steps out of the line standing in front of the Michelin office.
The oracle likes that. The oracle likes serious chefs. The oracle came to resemble a prep school headmaster when Derek Brown took over the guide in 1998. Many a French eyebrow was raised when Brown got the job, because he was, of all things, an Englishman. On the surface of it, a citizen of perfide Albion becoming the top arbiter of Gallic gastronomy seemed little short of heresy, but in fact Brown was just right for the role: he was a graduate of hotel school, a former cook and hotel manager, a former inspector, and a former Michelin spokesman. Perfectly dressed, perfectly manicured, and perfectly coiffed, this son of a naval architect had more than thirty years with the company, during which he grew invulnerably calm, reserved, and practiced in his mission—more auvergnat than the auvergnats. Bearing a vague resemblance to the former English prime minister John Major, effortlessly articulating the company philosophy in complex phrase upon subsidiary phrase that leaped nimbly between BBC standard English and fluent French, he was a model whom André and Edouard could have taken as one of their very own. How thoroughly did Derek Brown become a Michelin man? When he doodled on the margins of his notebook, he drew not flowers or figures but little Bibendum heads.
Early in 2004 Brown became the center of rather more notoriety than he would have liked because of l’affaire Rémy. While no one ever questioned his competence or dedication, it was on his watch that the whole messy business of Pascal Rémy’s firing erupted. With threats of lawsuits flying, Rémy went ahead and published his reminiscences of life as an inspector,* the high point of which was the revelation that at the time of his departure, a mere five inspectors were on the job in France. Bruta figura for Michelin: the company and the guide seriously lost face. Brown, who by coincidence reached retirement age at about the same time as the publication of Rémy’s book, left the guide in the hands of a successor who was clearly facing the need to hire a new, competent bunch of inspectors, and fast. The guide’s French inspector corps is now up to fifteen, according to Jean-Luc Naret.
Whoever was in charge, Michelin has always received supplicant chefs at avenue de Breteuil in gray, faceless conference rooms that are like spiritual torture chambers, because the visitors know they will never receive praise, advice, or tips on how to make their places more Michelin-friendly—nothing more than “tendencies,” echoes of what people are writing in their letters. The oracle is hermetic, and the impenetrable basilisk gaze that it turns on gastronomic penitents can turn strong legs to jelly. “I was trembling with terror the first time I was led into one of those little rooms,” recalled Jean-Paul Lacombe, two-star chef of the wonderful Léon de Lyon. Jean-Paul has been waiting for the third star to fall for more than twenty years now. One of these days it is sure to happen, but the oracle will not be rushed.
So fulsome is the ascendancy of the “Vatican” on avenue de Breteuil that these professional dialogues are for the most part limited to the aristocracy of the trade, those chefs possessing at least a star. Michelin does not have the personnel or time—or, for that matter, the inclination—to receive the teeming thousands of gastronomic hoi polloi who are mentioned in the guide, and there is something like an unstated code of good manners that maintains such individuals at a respectful distance, behind the red velvet ropes, as it were. Guillaume Giblin might be taken as a good example.
Guillaume is a serious and determined chef in his early thirties who broke his and his wife’s piggy banks, then supplemented that with a bank loan, to raise enough cash to buy out a cook who was retiring from a village restaurant in a place called Ormoy-la-Rivière, in the Essone countryside south of Paris. Although he is a terrific cook, a skilled professional who was trained under some of the country’s best two- and three-star chefs (Passard, Rostang, Martin, Coisel), he would never presume to beard the lion in his den and request a Michelin interview for himself. That would be presumptuous.
Guillaume’s restaurant, Le Vieux Chaudron, is merely listed in the guide, starless, and symbolized in the absolute bottom category of one crossed knife and fork (“quite comfortable”). As a yeoman of the trade, he knows his place, and he does not importune or play the grand. But he tries as hard as any young man may to please Papa Michelin. He serves great food at bargain-basement prices, bakes his own bread, washes his own dishes, launders his own napkins and tablecloths, personally cleans his restroom spotless every day, obliges his lone waiter to wear a tuxedo (no jewelry, no flashy watches), even when the hot summer sun is beating down, and sets himself a nonstop work routine that translates to eighty hours a week—all of this just to break even while living on his wife’s salary as an accountant.
That, he believes, is only the least he can do. Hell, if Michelin was a light to guide a demigod like Alain Chapel, what could it be for little Guillaume Giblin? You never know when an inspector might show up, and he admitted to living in permanent anxiety of just such a visit. In fact, an inspector had shown up just a few months before I spoke with him, and he was still nervous about the verdict, because the man didn’t say a word about the food. That’s the Michelin way. He discussed prices, supplies, the clients, the terrace, and the furniture, but never the food. Mum’s the word—the famous Michelin discretion. One is not an auvergnat for nothing.
“But can you remember what he ate that day?” I asked. Guillaume gazed at me with the indulgent smile of Garry Kasparov being asked if he remembered his first game against Karpov. “Marbré de poireaux et figues en vinaigrette de truffes,” he instantly said. “Dos de lieu jaune sur tombée de pousses d’épinards, beurre d’oursins; moelleux périgourdin aux noix, figues sèches et crème anglaise. Café. But I don’t think my setting here is good enough to get a star. I’d like to get the place painted, but I can’t afford it now. Maybe in four or five years.”
Like thousands of his confrères, Guillaume is waiting patiently at the red velvet ropes, watching his step, polishing up his silverware and his act. Someday his star will come. For him and all the other professionals who aspire to any sort of quality above that of a neighborhood canteen, the ongoing game of spot-the-inspector is an essential part of the daily routine. A lone man or woman appearing unannounced to ask for a table for one is enough to set the first alarm bells ringing. If the client arrives in an average car and is dressed in a tasteful but average manner—the Michelin man always wears jacket and tie, and you will never see a Michelin woman in jeans and T-shirt—the bell’s decibels go up, and if he or she demonstrates the indefinable but instantly recognizable manner of a connoisseur, someone who clearly knows what is going on with food and wine, the noise becomes a deafening clangor and the waiters begin whispering among themselves. Many a lone hairdresser, stockbroker, or guano futures dealer dining alone can thank Michelin’s anonymous monks and nuns for the extraordinarily assiduous service they have received.
Of course the company knows very well the strength of the mystique, and happily takes advantage of it to the last degree, notably sponsoring a form of Michelin terrorism that enlists its readers as standard bearers. One line of the guide’s introductory text says it all in bold red letters: YOUR RECOMMENDATION IS SELF EVIDENT IF YOU ALWAYS WALK INTO A HOTEL GUIDE IN HAND. Thousands of tourists (especially foreign) religiously follow the instructions, confident that Bibendum, like a voodoo grigri, will protect them from overcharging. They might just be right, too.
In a country where a novel distributed at more than 20,000 copies is considered a best-seller, Michelin’s annual sales of between 400,000 and 700,000 guides (the exact figure falls into the domain of “our little secret”) make it a megahit. At $25-plus a shot, it is an investment of some consequence, but the best part is that if you really want to follow all the latest developments in gastronomy, hotels, and prices, you need to renew it every year.
So Michelin towers above the competition in France, to be sure—but there is competition. Most famous is the guide now presented under a squished-together double name: GaultMillau. It was born as the brainchild of two smart Parisian journalists, Henri Gault and Christian Millau, who in the sixties were laboring together on the city beat for the daily Paris-Presse l’Intransigeant, and shared a fondness for good food. They also possessed two qualities notably absent from the Michelin: a sense of humor and the ability to write well. Striking off on their own, they founded an irreverent monthly gastronomic magazine entitled with their own names and, to accompany it, an eponymous annual guide in direct competition with the Michelin. Both the magazine and the guide did well, too, and the substitution of text—good, funny, colorful text—in place of Michelin’s dour symbols* made them extremely popular with a younger, less traditional set of readers.
Gault and Millau’s greatest coup was the invention of the gastronomic shot heard ’round the world: the term la nouvelle cuisine française. Today it is ancient history, the stuff of dinosaurs, but in the seventies and eighties it was something of a magic formula that transformed attitudes toward cooking—as often for ill as for good, it must be said. But it was one of those rare things that come at exactly the right moment and are enunciated in just the right way. Like a catchy jingle or a skillful advertising slogan, it caught fire and swept the world of cuisine off its feet. (In essence, Gault and Millau were only repeating an earlier marketing masterstroke, the “New Look” that Christian Dior threw out to hungry fashion writers in the fifties. It didn’t really mean much, but it was a terrific slogan.) Suddenly everyone wanted to do “new” cooking, whatever that meant. In its best avatars it was just a light lunch by Paul Bocuse: grilled red mullet with a crunchy string bean salad; or Pierre Troisgros’s infinitely imitated vegetable terrine; or Michel Guérard’s famous salade folle, richly larded with foie gras. At its worst it was . . . a million things, from turbot with raspberry coulis to geranium soufflés. Whatever the inspirations happened to be, though, they were invariably presented as tiny portions served on enormous plates, delicately arranged to demonstrate that the chef was not a mere cook, but an artiste. The debate is still on as to whether the nouvelle cuisine movement did more harm than good, but in its more dubious expressions, it was one of the silliest things imaginable.
Nouvelle cuisine eventually led to modern cuisine, then fusion, then what became known as cuisine tendance, wild inventiveness with a heavily experimental Spanish accent to it, and fickle Parisian diners, always avid for novelty, could always be counted on to gallop after whatever happened to be the latest fashion. For fifteen years or so, Gault and Millau reigned as the absolute champions of fashionable eating, but in the early eighties the founding fathers sold out and the guide began floating aimlessly from buyer to buyer—six or seven times, at last count—living off the echo of its old reputation and becoming more and more irrelevant with each change of owner.
For several decades of the postwar boom, a rival tire company, Kléber-Colombes, gamely attempted to match Michelin with its Guide Kléber, similar in style and format but hopelessly outclassed and out-spent by Clermont-Ferrand. (It was one of the many budget-challenged that was reduced to accepting the free-meal largesse of restaurant owners, thereby losing, hands down, the virginity contest with Big Red.) Le Guide Kléber died when Michelin simply bought the competing company. With a condescending sniff, the Service du Tourisme handed its hotel and restaurant documentation back to Kléber’s surviving edit staff, for free. In a new format it survives today as Le Bottin Gourmand. It is a handsome, professional effort, but no match for the Michelin.
Three or four other guides struggle along with the Bottin in the Michelin’s wake, and their efforts combine with the work of several gastronomic critics of daily papers and weekly magazines to form a considerable nexus of food writing. Most of these critics are so well known that they couldn’t pay in restaurants even if they wanted to, but a notable exception to the rule is a dapper, hard-driving quinquagénaire of surprisingly boyish appearance named François Simon, critic for the daily Le Figaro. Working solo, Simon does the full Michelin number, reserving tables under a fake name, appearing incognito, paying in cash, sending the bills to his boss, and writing his columns in full independence of spirit. In an effort to maintain his anonymity while promoting his paper, Simon has sometimes appeared masked for TV interviews, a tactic that drew much raillery and mocking comment from restaurateurs whom he had savaged in his commentaries. The mockery had a real edge of resentment to it, because Simon is a man of strongly disenchanted opinions, little patience, and a famously acid pen. Better than all his journalistic brothers and sisters, he exemplifies the tense love–hate relationship that exists in France between critics and chefs—in his case, a relationship rather heavily weighted toward the hate side of the equation for the outrage that his more negative comments can inspire.
As matters evolved in that rainy, muddy, depressing February of 2003, Simon found to his surprise that fate had assigned him a prominent role, along with both the Michelin and the GaultMillau, in what was to become known as le drame Loiseau.