Don't knock Michelin's little red book, argues The Guardian's Matthew Fort in the latest of our frank opinion pieces. It's the best restaurant guide, bar none.
It's that time of the year again.
There's a fluttering in restaurant kitchens and a twittering in the newspaper columns. Yes, the little red book, the Michelin Guide to Restaurants and Hotels of Great Britain and Ireland for 2005 is about to hit the bookshelves.
Not that the great British gourmet cares all that much, although chefs, restaurant proprietors and foreign visitors do. There are home-grown guides, of course. There's The Good Food Guide and publications from Harden's and the AA; London has the TimeOut guide and Charles Campion's Rough Guide devoted to its restaurants; then there are several also-rans and a growing number of web guides. The sad truth, though, is, that French-owned Michelin is the only one the restaurant industry sets any store by - and the even sadder truth is that it is quite right to do so, too.
It may well have become part of the national sporting calendar for critics to go in for ritual Michelin-bashing at the arrival of each year's guide, but then restaurant criticism is the only section of British journalism for which the primary qualification is complete ignorance of the subject being written about. In fact, if you look at Michelin's record over the last few years, you can see that it is the only guide with any real discernment, judgement and authority. It's even taken a few steps away from the haughty utterances that characterised its public manner for so many years, although its critical commentaries are brief to the point of gnomic.
Whatever the shortcomings of the manner of its pronouncements, though, in terms of open-mindedness and critical acuity, the Michelin is light years ahead of its rivals. Which guide first noted and promoted gastropubs? Michelin. Which guide noted and supported any number of brilliant and challenging eateries in the regions? Michelin again. Which guide put Ludlow on the map? Yep, that was Michelin, too. Which guide gave full recognition to Heston Blumenthal when he was still a figure of fun to most of
the British press? Go on, take a guess.
For heaven's sake, until very recently Michelin, that bastion of French cultural imperialism, even had an Englishman, Derek Brown, to oversee all its restaurant and hotel guide operations.
Of course, it doesn't get everything right. It has never really got the hang of non-European food, and its judgements betray its dependence upon French
gastronomic culture. But if only one could attribute such far-sightedness and
acuity to any British guide. Pre-eminent among these must be The Good Food Guide. (Its only reasonable challenger, The AA Guide, has yet, in my opinion, to recover from a bout of damaging
editorial infighting a couple of years back.) There was a time when The Good Food Guide bore the imprint of a single, unified editorial taste that gave it real authority. This was important because the guide has always depended on
recommendations and assessments of members of the Good Food Club for its raw ingredients. These used to be
subjected to a rigorous evaluation by the editors in question, who would not
hesitate to override the judgements of the members when the need arose.
That rigour has been absent for some time. Now the critical commentaries are merely edited from the assessments
written by the club members. The
connection between these and the marks given to each restaurant can seem at best odd and at worst simply arbitrary. Merely recycling the judgements of people who write in is an abnegation of responsibility. It is the job of a restaurant guide to
distinguish between the good and the not so good through informed analysis, not
simply to parrot the prevailing prejudices - or ignorance - of British eaters.
With the Harden's guides, things get worse. The Harden brothers may be a couple of decent, ex-City blokes trying to whittle a living in an ungrateful world, but that doesn't mean that they know what makes a decent restaurant. Speaking for myself, I never get the feeling from reading their guide or listening to their public utterances that they actually like eating out all that much. It's like having a pub being run by a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Every year they launch their guide with a heave at some prominent restaurateur or chef. Last time round it was Jamie Oliver; before that it was Gordon Ramsay; before that, Sir Terence Conran. You can't blame them. They're just trying sell a few copies.
What you can blame them for, though, is the basis on which their guide is put together. It follows the pattern of the even drearier Zagat guide: that of tabu-lating the forms sent in by members of the public. Do you know anyone who fills in such forms? Just who are these self-appointed arbiters of gastronomic excellence? And who checks their views? Ah yes, the food-loving Harden brothers, who must be larger than the Michelin man if they eat their way round all the restaurants their guide surveys.
This, of course, brings us to the heart of the problem: resources. If a guide is to be worth paying any attention to, it must
be independent, rigorous in its scrutiny and acute in its judgement. The role of
the editor is, well, critical, but, in the final analysis, accuracy and dependability
boil down to the number of trained
inspectors who will check and cross-check each others' experiences. Michelin employs 100 such inspectors in Europe, who travel throughout the continent and achieve an unparalleled level of coverage. The Fat Duck, for instance, was visited 25 times by different Michelin inspectors before it decided to award it a third star. Only Michelin can, and does, carry out inspections on this scale. The proof of the pudding, as you might say, is in the eating.
Do you share Matthew's opinions? Which guides do you rely upon when selecting a restaurant to visit? Let us know your thoughts by writing to the usual addressor by emailing food@jbcp.co.uk.