I remember watching a video on how Michelin Stars started out as a travel guide brochure for the best restaurants in France as a sort of advertisement for Michelin branded tyres (look at all these restaurants you could go to with Michelin tyres!).
How did the Michelin stars become so sought after by top restaurants and chefs? Was the head of the Michelin tyre company also a renowned food connoisseur or something? What about other tyre companiee, why didn’t they do something similar? Are Michelin Stars still given by the tyre company, or has it been spun off into its own thing?
For the same reason that the World Record Holders are decided by a brewery. They just started doing it, and people wanted to be on their list.
That was almost certainly to help settle bar arguments before they became bar fights.
You’re half right! It was actually to prevent golf course fights.
The michelin thing was to get people to drive around more, driving up tourism and tyre use
Does it matter where a good idea comes from?
TIL Michelin, Nobel and Guinness have the best marketing departments
Guinness They got Sir Alec to do lifetime marketing for them, hard to top that.
To promote travel by car, Michellin started testing restaurants all over the country to give recommendations where automobilists could get a good meal on their tours.
Tasting History with Max Miller has a video on exactly this topic! Highly recommend it.
The Michelin Guide is still run by the tyre company, and for much the same reasons - advertising, and getting people to go through their tyres faster (one Star justifies a stop, two Stars justify a detour, three Stars justify a special trip?) Though inspectors do try to offer genuine reviews, because at this point people who value such things trust the Guide because the Guide’s usually pretty close to reality.
It’s because of british tourists. They’re so used to eating rubber-like food
And tyres aren’t cheap, which was the whole point. The Michelin Stars program was to show you what was worth wearing out your tyres more for as opposed to local stuff.
I would always advocate for finding local businesses to support, but that wouldn’t help a tyre company sell more tyres, now would it?
As for why other tyre companies didn’t do it, they didn’t need to. You don’t need to buy Michelin tyres to visit restaurants awarded Michelin Stars. The restaurant doesn’t check. They don’t even care. It’s not about the tyre brand for them. Certainly people with other tyre brands will go to places with Michelin Stars… but if you can’t afford Michelin tyres, you probably can’t afford to eat at places with Michelin Stars, either.
Something about they made a guide for customers to visit destinations and it evolved into the finer dining experiences over the years. Details are fuzzy but I don’t think it’s as eventful as anything involving the Dulles brothers
There was a point where tires were expensive but they lasted a long time because so few people had cars and they didn’t drive them often. So two brothers who owned a tire company were trying to figure out how to sell more tires to the few people who owned cars.
The answer was to get them to wear their tires out faster by providing a list of places they could visit that would warrant the expense of wearing down their tires.
So the stat rating was more of a "this place is worth a visit/road trip system. And they published this list and it caught on and then restaurants wanted to get Michelin stars for the notariety and the essentially free press.
and it caught on
I feel like the real question is in this statement
Iirc it was printed as a guide with maps and stars marking the restaurants locations and given out with the tyres for free. I guess people back then had nothing better to do than road trip to restaurants. It was popular enough restaurants wanted to be in it which caused them to up their game so the reviewers would add them to the guide and it escalated to where it is now.
Are there actually Michelin stars given to us restaurants (except for Burger King)?
About 1500 of them apparently.
I stand accused.
It’s pretty global, anywhere with a good restaurant culture will probably have at least one or two. I believe Tokyo is the city with the most stars for example, I would have assumed it was Paris or somewhere else french before I found that out
It’s not global, Michelin stars aren’t a thing in Australia atleast. I imagine there’s a lot of places where people don’t get food recs from a tyre company.
I’ve eaten in US restaurants that rival restaurants in Paris.
I’d say the average restaurant in France is definitely better than the average in the US - but this is comparing apples and oranges.
New Yorkers would actually take offense at this question: they believe they have the best restaurants in the world (I don’t agree, but they have an argument given the great variety of immigrants that settled there since before the US existed).
I’d agree that NYC has probably the most diverse food scene in the world.
Why are Nobel prizes so highly revered when they originate from an explosives manufacturer?
my cooking always get 3 Goodyear stars.
Because everybody wants to invent dynamite
Well, at least the Pulitzer Prize makes sense, I guess.
Because French.
Orson Welles: A-HAAAAAaaaa the-Fr3nchhhh
Because they have held a very high standard for a very long time. It is one of the few “brands” of reviews that has remained trustworthy over the years. They only award a star to excellence; nothing in the guide is bad. Indeed there is lots of good food that’s never mentioned in the guide.
My opinion as someone who was in the restaurant industry for about 20 years.
I think it basically came down to this. If you can convince people to go to a restaurant that needs a bit of a road trip, you will sell more tyres. And if you did need new tyres, the guide conveniently pointed you to garages that, surprise, sold Michelin.
Tourism was growing quickly at the time, so the guide focused on the popular destinations of the era. France of course but also places like Switzerland and Spain. Being based in France and tied to the car industry, Michelin rode the growth of both car travel and French dining culture.
French cuisine was already becoming dominant by the early twentieth century, and after the war you had top French chefs getting hired by major restaurants in places like New York. Le Cordon Bleu started around the same time in the late nineteenth century and benefitted from the rise of French fine dining, though it was not created by Michelin, I think they both rode the same wave.
By the nineteen twenties the restaurant section of the guide was already important, and in the nineteen thirties they introduced the three-star system. Once there was a clear hierarchy, chefs began competing for stars, and the Michelin rating became the recognised standard for fine dining. So having a star meant you would get free global reach can charge a premium and knew people would actively seek you out, I guess you just had to make sure you had parking.
