The Michelin Guide Comes to Shanghai — Who Will Care the Most?

Or put it another way: what will this little book bring? Stricter restaurant management, more pressure on chefs, or fussier diners?

• The quality of the ingredients
• The skill in preparing the food, and the harmony of flavors
• The expression of the chef's personal style
• Whether it is worth the price
• Consistency in cooking standards

The Frenchman Jeremy Biasiol first ran into the Michelin Guide's five criteria in 2008. That was the year Michelin announced it was coming to Hong Kong, and Jeremy had just left New York to open his own restaurant there, Mirror.

To be precise, Jeremy lived through two thrilling moments. The first: he had heard the inspectors were in town and had been fretting for weeks when they suddenly walked into his restaurant and handed over their business cards. The second came at the end of 2011, when his restaurant finally won a star. He still remembers that the day was his mother's birthday, and that a friend took a photo of him crying and sent it to a local paper.

"I think this is my destiny," he says. "When I was in France, I heard Michelin was going to New York, so I wanted to go to New York — and then the restaurant I worked at in New York got a star. I went from New York to Hong Kong, and that year Michelin came to Hong Kong too. In 2014 I came to Shanghai, and now Michelin is here as well. Is it following me?"

Jeremy is now head chef at Jade on 36, the restaurant inside the Pudong Shangri-La in Shanghai. In April he got a call from a friend, another chef at a restaurant on the Bund, and heard the news: "Watch out, the Michelin inspectors are already in town."

Michelin China did not announce that the Guide was coming to Shanghai until May 17th, but Jeremy and his fellow chefs had been on alert at least a month before that. Nobody knew who the inspectors were. They were already testing new dishes.

1.

There are many ways to describe the Michelin Guide. It is a dining guide updated every year, and Shanghai will be the 29th edition published worldwide. It is the highest honor in the cooking world. It is a content business headquartered in the suburbs of Paris, with several hundred employees, that prints more than 20 million books a year. And it belongs to the tire maker Michelin, which created it to get people to travel by car.

The first Michelin Guide, in 1900, was a booklet given away free with tires. A copy now sells for about US$20.

Of those several hundred employees, nearly 100 are inspectors, on top of the editorial team. "Most of the inspectors working in Shanghai right now are Chinese," says Fang Nuode, president of Michelin China. The Shanghai inspection team, he says, began taking shape four or five years ago; inspectors usually know several cuisines well and have studied hotel management. They book, order, and pay like ordinary customers, and reveal who they are only when they need a restaurant to hand over information.

The selection process has many steps: visiting restaurants and hotels, checking facts, writing the entries, laying out the pages. The editor-in-chief sets the inspection schedule, then the inspectors eat — the official figure is 250 meals a year — and write reports. Inspections are cross-assigned, so Shanghai inspectors also fly to France to eat, and the verdict on a restaurant is settled collectively after several visits by different inspectors. If they disagree, more inspectors are sent for a second visit.

When Fang Nuode spoke to QDaily on June 16th, he recited these principles almost mechanically, as though he were describing not a dining guide but a manual for making tires.

Frank Bruni, a food columnist for The New York Times, once wrote in his memoir about being spotted everywhere he went: the kitchens of New York's big restaurants had his photo up on the wall, and he was treated roughly the way a wanted man would be. Michelin inspectors, by contrast, keep up a furtive anonymity. So the judges insist on "consistency" and the judged promise to treat every customer "exactly alike" — the foreplay that plays out before every new Michelin Guide. Xu Dong, executive chef of Dashu Wujie, told us the company has already held a meeting about it. "We'll stay calm about it and treat it as one yardstick."

On dealing with inspectors, Jeremy says: "You get nervous, you start watching the customers. It's been six years since I got my star — the point is not to change your restaurant for Michelin." Once inspectors decide to put a restaurant in the guide, they reveal themselves and ask all kinds of questions. "They ask me what I think about cooking, why I make a certain dish, why the restaurant has that name, why it's decorated that way."

The questions are more than due diligence. They show how much a team has already stored up about the people it watches. This time, for instance, the inspectors added one more: from the owner down to the hotel restaurant's staff, has anyone run into trouble?

Jeremy's last restaurant, Mirror, lasted three years and four months in Hong Kong, and the Michelin Guide filed it under "trendy French." It did not fetishize French ingredients and had no menu. The chef bought local ingredients in season and turned them into a dinner of four to six courses. The shipping costs saved that way let customers eat for less than French food usually costs.

When he left Hong Kong, he emailed Michelin to tell them. "We've always kept in touch. They asked me where I was going, what I'd be doing. After I came to the Shangri-La, they insisted on meeting me." He is obviously not the only name in the inspectors' address book.

"So what did you tell them?"

"I said a lot of nice things." Jeremy roared with laughter, then showed us a photo of the bookcase at home, packed with Michelin guides from around the world.

2.

At least two of the chefs we interviewed made the same comparison: for a chef, the Michelin selection is the Olympics. Chen Shijie, executive chef at Putien, says, "So far no restaurant with a star has let me down." Jeremy Biasiol says a Michelin star can "change your life."

The "fork and spoon" symbol in the guide stands for the dining room. A restaurant needs at least one fork and spoon to appear in the book at all. Only then does it compete for one, two, or three stars — gold, silver, and bronze.

The official wording: a one-star restaurant cooks very well and is worth a stop; a two-star restaurant is worth a detour; a three-star restaurant is exceptional and worth a trip of its own. There are 2,684 starred restaurants in the world today, and only 111 of them hold three stars. France has the most three-star restaurants, 26, followed by Japan with 25.

A Michelin star is what many restaurant owners chase all their lives. Besides the prestige, it is worth real money. Data shows that a restaurant that wins a star can see about 30% more customers through the door — and the reverse is true as well. Some call this the "Michelin kiss." There is another name for it: the "Michelin curse."

According to a 2014 Fortune report, the Spanish chef Julio Biosca decided to give back the star his restaurant won in 2009. A star, he thought, was both an honor and a tightening headband: the waiters always had to rattle off a pile of adjectives to explain the ingredients and steps behind one complicated dish, and in that atmosphere he could not invent anything. In fact, plenty of restaurants lose money keeping up the expensive standard Michelin likes. "Behind the Stars: A Concise Typology of Michelin Restaurants in Europe," published in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, found that nearly half of the 36 Michelin restaurants it surveyed made no profit, and that many chefs used their fame to earn private cooking fees that propped up the restaurant.

Because of that "consistency" standard, Michelin's rating system has tied some chefs to the mold of expensive French cooking. In early 2004 an inspector named Pascal Rémy broke his confidentiality agreement and published a book — Michelin fired him, of course — titled roughly The Inspector Sits Down at the Table. In it he wrote that L'Auberge de l'Ill, the three-star restaurant in eastern France, had served "exactly the same dishes for twenty years."

Reputation became a sword hanging over chefs' heads. "Getting a star is wonderful, losing one is awful," the German chef Stefan Stiller told us. "You'd rather never have been rated than lose one." The most extreme case was in 2003, when Bernard Loiseau, a French chef of 52, was believed to have shot himself because he could not bear the pressure of his restaurant losing a star.

Stefan, whose own kitchen once held a star, left Germany in 2005 to make a career in Shanghai. He ran a cooking school at The Cool Docks near the Bund and a restaurant under his own name there. His newest project, open a little over a month, is Taian Table, a reservation-only restaurant on Taian Road.

"One dish here takes a team of five or six chefs a whole day to get ready for you. We start at 9am and work until midnight, every day. My team puts in 14 to 16 hours a day, so I don't think the price is expensive at all." Taian Table offers two set menus, at 998 yuan and 1,288 yuan, has 20 seats, and changes the menu every month — all of which looks "very much to Michelin's taste."

Yet when Stefan first arrived in Shanghai, one thing that pleased him was that there was no Michelin Guide here. Michelin means pressure, he says: "In the days before the German guide comes out, chefs always spend a lot of sleepless nights."

3.

Making a Michelin Guide for Shanghai, Fang Nuode says, is hard above all because Shanghai has too many restaurants. "The challenge here isn't finding restaurants to inspect. It's finding more time to inspect them."

Michelin is not short of experience judging Asian food. It went into Japan in 2007 and Hong Kong and Macau in 2008. Each time the guide decides to enter a new place, the company builds a new inspection team; new inspectors, once chosen, are trained by senior ones, which takes a long time. Again, Fang Nuode stressed that nothing would be judged differently here.

Even so, the Hong Kong guide did strike many people as different. The Michelin Guide Hong Kong Macau 2009 came out in late 2008, more than 300 pages long. Twenty-eight restaurants won stars, but most of them were hotel restaurants; famous Cantonese houses such as Fook Lam Moon and Yung Kee got only one star each, which Hong Kong reporters and food people questioned. A year later Michelin sharply increased the number of cheaper, more ordinary restaurants it listed, and the count of starred restaurants reached 42. Ah Hung Snacks in North Point and Tim Ho Wan in Mong Kok gained the most directly, becoming the cheapest one-star Michelin restaurants in the world.

"Maybe it was more of a political decision. They have to sell books — what's the point if there are no starred restaurants?" Stefan says. He does not think, though, that Michelin lowered its standards for Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong the "Michelin kiss" has another face. After Ah Hung Snacks won a star five years running, its original North Point shop had to close when the landlord raised the rent by 60%. The 2016 Hong Kong guide added a street-food section; Cheung Hing Kee Shanghai Pan-Fried Buns on Chuen Lung Street in Tsuen Wan, which made the list, put up a goodbye notice a month later, saying it was moving because the landlord had raised the rent. For a cheap eating house, a Michelin recommendation turned into the kiss of death.

Now it is Shanghai's turn.

Shanghai is not a stranger to Michelin. It has had no guide of its own, but it has no shortage of restaurants with Michelin blood. Most of them serve Western or Cantonese food, and they are either Shanghai branches of starred restaurants abroad or new places opened by chefs who once worked in starred kitchens. Jean-Georges at Three on the Bund is one: this branch of the three-star New York restaurant settled in Shanghai 12 years ago.

"Every restaurant in the Bund group has its eye on Michelin." Gao Yan, who writes the WeChat account Yipian Chixin, has eaten at thirty or forty starred restaurants abroad over the years. In 2011 she had a meal at Taohuayuan Xiaochu in Shanghai's Plaza 66 and saw a copy of that year's Michelin Guide Hong Kong Macau 2011 on display by the door. The Hong Kong branch of Taohuayuan Xiaochu had just won a star, so the Shanghai branch set the honor up at the entrance, with a belly band made specially for it.

Hotel restaurants always want Michelin more, Gao Yan says. Their food is more standardized and steadier, which makes a good rating easier to get; and a star lifts a whole chain brand at once.

The Shanghai branch of 8 ½ Otto e Mezzo BOMBANA, the three-star Hong Kong restaurant, on Yuanmingyuan Road near the Bund, has been named by many media outlets as a favorite to win a star in this guide, but its management decided last month not to give any interviews about Michelin. Joël Robuchon, the French chef who holds 26 Michelin stars, opened a new place at Bund 18 in March, a project backed by the French consulate in Shanghai; they too say nothing about the Shanghai guide.

Cai Wenlong is from Hong Kong. He worked at Lei Garden, whose branches have won five one-star ratings between them, and moved to Shanghai a year ago to run Taohuayuan Xiaochu's Plaza 66 location as general manager. During our interview he kept picking up calls from the restaurant: "Four captains and six servers in the service department, and too much tangnong going on." He told us, "We've added a lot of weishang dishes lately, and switched to plates with our logo on them." Tangnong means finishing the last step of the cooking in front of the customer; weishang means turning an ordinary Chinese dish into a Western-style single portion, which has to look far more refined.

"In this business everyone does some preparing to get into the Michelin Guide, especially the chains, the well-known names, the demanding brands — they raise the bar on operations and on what comes out of the kitchen." Putien, which won a Bib Gourmand in Hong Kong, has lately tightened its internal reviews, says Chen Shijie, its executive chef for Greater China. Every month its Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai branches now audit one another across regions to make sure the standard is followed.

Standardization and service may be the two biggest things standing between Chinese restaurants and stars. There is a saying about the state-owned ones, Gao Yan says: eating at these old houses is a matter of luck — if the head chef is at the stove it is delicious, and if you get an apprentice, hard luck. Most chefs in China handle only the kitchen, while service and management belong to another team, and food and service come apart: good food, terrible service.

Wine pairing, besides, is an important measure in judging Western food, but many Chinese restaurants cannot produce a decent wine list — which is why the criteria Michelin has published in China step around the subject.

Readers, at least, Shanghai does not seem to lack. What surprised Stefan a little is that 80% of his customers lately have been young Chinese. "They've tried different kinds of food and culture, and they're curious about how we prepare things — 'what are the raw ingredients?', 'what's the idea behind this dish?'" Michelin, for its part, says it worked out how many readers to expect before it came.

4.

Michelin put out a set of app versions of the guide in 2013 and withdrew them soon after. It has dodged the question of why. In any case, this year it plans to restart the digital project — though there are still all those new books to publish every year, and somebody has to sell them.

With the European market shrinking, Michelin, like many chefs who have left Europe, is looking for new openings. In markets it has worked for decades, unless you put food above everything, many people who "bought one copy aren't likely to buy a new one the year after."

Asked about the guide's weaknesses, Jeremy says, "They should hurry up and catch up with where the restaurant business is going. Restaurants get rated online now. None of that existed ten years ago." Faced with how fast information moves, Michelin always answers that it "cares more about quality." Still, new markets were only a matter of time: Singapore and Seoul were announced alongside Shanghai.

From the tire company's point of view, the guide, now more than a century old, has largely finished the job it was made for: making the name Michelin known to everyone. In today's terms, though, the Michelin Guide is a huge piece of content marketing for Michelin tires, expensive and hard to measure, and all the company can do is move the editorial office out to the Paris suburbs to trim some of the cost.

For ordinary diners, meanwhile, more and more rivals are offering the same thing Michelin does: restaurant recommendations.

One is the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, started in 2002 by the British magazine Restaurant and treated as Michelin's chief competitor. Its voting academy is made up of more than 1,000 people from the international food business — critics, gourmets, dining columnists, chefs, restaurant owners — and the annual ceremony is always a spectacle.

Besides the "Oscars of food," World's 50 Best, the guide's challengers include La Liste, backed by the French tourism office, and every country's own version of Dianping — Zagat in the United States, Tabelog in Japan, with TripAdvisor and Yelp working everywhere. Some have more character, or reach markets Michelin has never entered; others grew up on the internet and update by the day.

The challenge has not reached the professionals, though. Michelin's stars are still their holy grail.

About the other lists, we heard all sorts of things: "They just publish their own opinions, and their view of food isn't wide enough." "It's all an insiders' game — some restaurants on the list are good, some paid their way on." "I don't trust World's 50 Best's judgment." "Most food lists are badly written, and the editors have pitifully little background in food." "To me World's 50 Best is more of a trend list. It sweeps up restaurants from all over the world, some in South America, some in Southeast Asia. But why would I fly to Peru for one meal?"

Chefs and managers alike, even so, are waiting for the Shanghai guide in September. Jeremy is pleased with the answers he gave the inspectors a month ago, and hopes that this time they read what Jade on 36 is trying to do: no more tasting menu, and customers free to order what they like. Cai Wenlong got the forms from the inspectors a couple of days ago and breathed out a little. Stefan does not expect a star this year, since his restaurant has only just opened and "Michelin doesn't take how a restaurant is run into account." He even thinks the Western restaurants in the guide matter less: "The first thing they should be inspecting on the mainland is Chinese restaurants — learning Chinese food, and China's famous chefs."

Michelin has arrived in a place where the magic has already worn off. There are still people here who "hold certain expectations of a Michelin restaurant" — Jin Peihua, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Catering and Cuisine Association, thinks, like many others, that Michelin means expensive dining. China's restaurant market has been sliding and remaking itself in bulk since the anti-corruption campaign, and Jin Peihua guesses Michelin's arrival might pull some high-end customers back in.

Shanghai is not short of its own, more varied yardsticks either: there is a late-night-snack map, a soup-dumpling index, and leases here are said to run a little longer than in Hong Kong. Especially since Tsuta, a Tokyo ramen shop where the bill runs 50 yuan a head, won a star last year — Michelin, which has already made room for "trendy French," will only shed its idol's dignity faster in new markets.

For a chef, though, it all stays simple. Jeremy Biasiol, who has made Michelin his life's pursuit, put it this way: "Three stars is my dream. This time I hope to get at least one — and that night I'm going to get thoroughly drunk."