Michelin Finally Published Its Shanghai List. Honestly, Nothing Much Happened

Some of the restaurants that made the list don't think it's a big deal, and the city's amateur foodies don't seem satisfied

German chef Stefan Stiller had already opened a bottle of champagne, ready to celebrate the one Michelin star awarded to Taian Table, his new restaurant in Shanghai. It is the second time Michelin has favored him; a restaurant he ran in Germany also held a star.

"For our team, it's an achievement," Stiller told QDaily by phone. They were planning a dinner to mark it.

Taian Table is one of 122 restaurants in the Michelin Guide Shanghai 2017, released this morning: one three-star, seven two-star and 18 one-star. Michelin also launched an iOS and Android app alongside it.

Usually a nod from this world-famous booklet packs a dining room. East Eatery, the Shanghai restaurant run by Stiller's wife, also made the list, and they hope business will pick up; a poor location had kept it from doing well.

Michelin is famous enough to send customers to restaurants nobody has heard of. This highest of honors in the chef's world belongs to the Michelin tire company. It began as a way to get people to drive more, and has grown into a content business headquartered outside Paris, with several hundred staff and more than 20 million books printed a year. Three stars is the top of its scale.

Michelin only announced it was coming to Shanghai this May. By then it had published 29 guides worldwide. Next to the long survey cycles it runs abroad, the four months of preparation that followed look very tight — in that time nearly 100 professional inspectors, most of them Chinese, made anonymous visits, tasted and scored. Most people in the trade, chefs included, had known for months and were nervous, hoping to stand out on the five criteria: quality of ingredients, mastery of technique, the chef's personality, value for money, and consistency across visits.

Some diners here already trust the honor completely and eat wherever the guide points. Michelin, for its part, clearly wants a place in the Asian restaurant market as fast as possible. When local food meets a rating system invented in Paris, the result can be awkward.

Cities with an international streak were the obvious first picks. Tokyo, Hong Kong and Macau got Michelin restaurants first; this year, alongside Shanghai, Michelin released guides to Seoul and Singapore — read as a signal that it is pushing hard into Asia.

Shanghai is Michelin's fifth city in Asia, and the Michelin Guide Shanghai 2017 is its 29th guide worldwide. When M on the Bund opened on Guangdong Road in 1999, the city met fine Western dining for the first time. After the 2008 Olympics, Shanghai's Western dining scene grew faster, and more chefs carrying Michelin stars arrived — the French chef Joël Robuchon opened at Bund 18 this March, and, no surprise, took two stars in the guide released this morning.

The full list stayed sealed until the press conference on the 21st ended; no reporter there could get it in advance. Once it was out, T'ang Court — the single three-star restaurant, long the subject of rumor — set off an argument. Jocelyn, founder of TastyTrip, which runs Michelin dining tours around the world, told us she had eaten there just last week and thought the food fell short of some one-star restaurants. She has eaten at more than a hundred Michelin restaurants.

"It's still on the conservative side — 26 starred restaurants, less than half of Hong Kong's. That's a bit of a shame," she said.

Michelin's political correctness: Cantonese food and the old-name restaurants

Nineteen of the 26 starred restaurants are Chinese, and nine of those serve Cantonese food. Since T'ang Court and 8 ½ Otto E Mezzo Bombana already hold stars in Hong Kong, it can feel as though Hong Kong had simply been moved over wholesale.

With the European market shrinking, Michelin, like many of the chefs leaving Europe, is hunting for new openings. In the markets it has worked for years, unless you put food above everything, you "buy one copy and don't bother with a new one the next year."

In each new market Michelin is notably cautious and notably local — much as it was in Hong Kong. The Michelin Guide Hong Kong Macau 2009, published at the end of 2008, ran to some 300 pages and gave stars to 28 restaurants, most of them inside hotels; celebrated Cantonese houses such as Fook Lam Moon and Yung Kee got only one star, and much of the Hong Kong press and restaurant world questioned the result. A year later Michelin added far more restaurants at ordinary prices and the starred count reached 42. Hung's Delicacies in North Point and the Tim Ho Wan dim sum shop in Mong Kok gained the most, becoming the cheapest one-star restaurants in the world.

Stefan Stiller, whose Taian Table has now taken a Shanghai star, once put it this way: "Maybe it's more of a political decision. They have to sell books — what's the point if there are no starred restaurants?"

The other obvious pattern: many of Shanghai's old-name restaurants got a Michelin recommendation, among them Da Hu Chun, Lao Zheng Xing, Godly and the Nanxiang Steamed Bun Shop. These are places where a meal costs under 200 yuan a head, often far less. Putting so many of them on the list may be the lesson Michelin learned in Hong Kong.

The old-name restaurants themselves barely registered the coronation. We stopped by the Da Hu Chun flagship near the Bund at lunchtime today; neither manager Ms. Hu nor outlet manager Huang Huichao knew much about Michelin. It did not stop the place from being unusually busy.

People who run these restaurants doubt Michelin can make a place with a century of history behind it any more trustworthy. Huang Huichao said Da Hu Chun is never short of reporters; simply moving to a bigger shop lifted monthly revenue from 400,000 yuan to 1 million. His headache now is the next opening.

Da Hu Chun, a dumpling and snack shop founded in 1932 on Sichuan Middle Road, has opened four outlets in the year since it went corporate last October, and moved the original shop from No. 243 to its present address. The new location sits closer to the Bund and draws office workers. It has drawn them: "Our old customers have learned to skip the white-collar rush and come a little later," Ms. Hu said.

As a newcomer, Michelin may need these restaurants more than they need it. They look like a choice that cannot go wrong: with them on the list, a guide from Paris looks as though it understands the local food. But these are probably not the places young people go most often.

Shanghai's Michelin clusters

We plotted every starred restaurant on Google Maps. The densest clusters are the Bund and Jing'an Temple — which are also the two most expensive places to eat in Shanghai.

Five of the seven two-star restaurants are on the Bund, along with nearly every non-Chinese kitchen, innovative cuisine included. The Chinese restaurants sit in three places: Jing An Kerry Centre and West Nanjing Road; the IFC in Pudong; and Huaihai Road and Xintiandi. The first two run to Jiangsu-Zhejiang cooking; the last has both Chinese and Western.

Prices at the starred restaurants vary widely — from 100 yuan a head at the low end to 5,571 yuan at the top — but most land between 300 and 700 yuan.

Notes on the list

The cheapest two-star in the world

More than half the two-star restaurants are Chinese, and, as you would guess, Cantonese cooking dominates. Canton 8, on Runan Street, averages 127 yuan a head, which makes it arguably the cheapest two-star restaurant anywhere: "At Canton 8, diners can have two-star cooking for as little as 48 yuan, or lunch for a little over six euros."

The only grill house

Kanpai, the Taiwanese grill at Bund 5, has been packed since it opened last summer. Its Shanghai branch took a star after only a year in business, making it the only barbecue restaurant with a Michelin star other than Wagyu Meisai Zen in Tokyo.

The one that got away: Jean-Georges

Jean-Georges at Three on the Bund was long a favorite to win a star; this branch of a New York three-star has been in Shanghai for 12 years. It got nothing, which many diners and fellow chefs found hard to believe.

"Dianping, what do you think?"

For the ordinary diner, the number of rivals offering restaurant recommendations keeps growing.

One is the World's 50 Best Restaurants, started in 2002 by the British magazine Restaurant and seen as Michelin's chief competitor. Its panel of more than 1,000 people from the international food world — critics, gourmets, food columnists, head chefs, restaurant owners — hands out awards with great fanfare every year.

Besides the "Oscars of food," Michelin's challengers include La Liste, backed by the French tourism board, and the local Dianping equivalents of each country: Zagat in the United States, Tabelog in Japan, TripAdvisor and Yelp everywhere. Some are more specialized, or reach markets Michelin has not entered; some live on the internet and update by the day. All of them, the argument goes, know their local food markets better than Michelin does.

In Shanghai, of course, Michelin's main competitor is Dianping. Here is how the starred restaurants look on the review site — some of the more entertaining entries:

monaxu on Da Hu Chun: Delicious! We'd meant to eat at the Michelin chef's place next door, but the lunch menu was a letdown, so we gave up. Walked past Da Hu Chun, the name rang a bell, never been, so in we went.

crystalsnowing on T'ang Court: The boss took us out and picked this place. Service is good overall, well suited to a high-end business dinner. But the value for money really isn't there.

Fanqie Ai Pingguo 0717 on T'ang Court: Shanghai's T'ang Court is the only place in the country where the waiter — the manager, really — remembered my surname the whole way through, after only three or four emails beforehand. Rare. The food is finely made and above standard. Only three restaurants in China clear that bar: Jinsha Ting, T'ang Court and Yong Yi Ting. From my own experience, Shanghai's T'ang Court deserves a high score.

louloulou on T'ang Court: Looks like they changed chefs — the food has clearly slipped. The restaurant says they swapped in some new chefs and adjusted dishes in order to become a Michelin restaurant. A lot of the service staff have changed too; they're polite enough, but hardly one of them is quick on the uptake. At this rate, what does it matter whether they get a star?

lucyluuuuujiang on Canton 8: Saw it on Weibo and had to try it. I'll push this one hard — worth the long trip. Met friends after work; heard it gets crowded so we phoned ahead to book, and they were very nice about it.

Daniel_Daniucai on Ultraviolet: It isn't right to describe this in terms of taste alone. It's a near-immersive piece of theater, a meal set to light and sound that leaves you happy, with taste, sight and hearing fused into one; you take part yourself, the dopamine peaks, and that is the point of it.

Gelsey～ on 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo BOMBANA: #house dessert# oh my god!! So bad I wanted to jump in the river. What is that little red square — a slab of Xinjiang nut cake? With frosting on top, honestly something bought at the supermarket and plated. I didn't go to school for long, but don't take me for a fool.

AH6688 on 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo BOMBANA: The set menu isn't cheap. The chef's invention deserves credit, though, and with that view it feels worth doing once in a long while.

The full list follows.

Three stars

T'ang Court — Cantonese

Two stars

8 ½ Otto E Mezzo Bombana — Italian

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon — modern French

Ultra Violet — innovative

Canton 8 — Cantonese

Yi Long Court — Cantonese

Imperial Treasure — Cantonese

YongFoo Elite — Shanghainese

One star

Sir Elly's — modern French

Da Dong (IAPM Mall) — Chinese

Da Dong Sea Cucumber (Yueyang Plaza) — Chinese

Madame Goose (Xinzhuang) — Cantonese roast meats

Phénix — French

Fu He Hui — vegetarian

Seventh Son (Kerry Centre) — Cantonese

Jin Xuan — Cantonese

Kanpai — Japanese grill

Lao Zheng Xing — Shanghainese

Lei Garden (Shanghai IFC) — Cantonese

Lei Garden (IAPM Mall) — Cantonese

Mi Shanghai — Shanghainese

Nanlu Zheli — Hangzhou

Su Zhe Zong Hui — Shanghainese

Taian Table — innovative

Xin Rong Ji (Shanghai Square) — Chinese

Yong Yi Ting — Shanghainese

And the Bib Gourmand, which marks good food at ordinary prices, went to 25 places this time. If you know Shanghai, one of them may be a regular haunt:

A Niang Mian Alma by DN (Spanish) Da Hu Chun (Sichuan Road) Da Shu Wu Jie (Shanghai World Financial Center) Da Shu Wu Jie (the Bund) Da Shu Wu Jie (Xujiahui Park) Din Tai Fung (Shanghai Centre) East Eatery Crystal Jade (Xintiandi) Godly (West Nanjing Road) Hai Jin Zi (Jinxian Road) Han Mama Jesse Jin Gang Wonton and Noodles (Mengzi Road) Lan Ting Lan Xin Lu Bo Lang Mao Long Mi Thai Nanxiang Steamed Bun Shop (City God Temple) Shanghai Lao Zhan Su Zhe Hui (Chong Hing Finance Center) Wenxing Restaurant Yangzhou Restaurant (Middle Fujian Road) Tasty Congee and Noodle Wontun Shop (Shanghai IFC)