Feast or Famine | So what if most Michelin-starred restaurants are expensive? They provide pleasure, and employment
- Critics say that by rating mostly expensive restaurants, Michelin serves only the rich who can afford their food, and should do more for cheaper places
- For Michelin this is a no-win argument. It could subsidise such restaurants, you say. But it couldn’t afford to help them all, so how to choose beneficiaries?
Last week, the results of the 2021 Michelin guide to restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau were released. Included were the usual suspects – Amber (still at two stars), Caprice and Lung King Heen (both at the Four Seasons Hong Kong hotel) with three, and Tim Ho Wan with one.
There were some nice upgrades (Tate and L’Envol going from one to two stars), some places Michelin missed out on (most notably Mono), and also a few newcomers, including Ando, The Araki, and my favourite Chinese restaurant, The Chairman, which was inexplicably excluded from the starred portion of the guide for the past few years.
With the results came the criticism: how could Michelin even think about giving stars in times like these, when restaurants in Hong Kong are dealing with evening closures and fewer people dining out? This will probably happen everywhere Michelin is releasing its 2021 guides (they are bypassing places that are especially hard hit). I also expect to hear the same criticism when the 2021 list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants is released in March.
This is one of those situations that has no chance of pleasing everyone. I can understand those who say that it’s not a good time for any publication to be reviewing restaurants – at least the extremely critical, no-holds barred reviews. (None of mine were like that – if I really disliked a place, I didn’t write about it, but in any case, I stopped the review columns for the South China Morning Post’s Lifestyle pages last April).
Critics say that because Michelin gives most of its stars to high-end places, it is catering only to the millionaires and billionaires of the world, when it is the cheaper establishments that are suffering. Unfortunately, the suffering is across the board – starred restaurants are closing, too.