Opinion | Why only dining at Michelin-star restaurants on vacation misses the point of travel

It’s ridiculous to build a trip around ‘collecting’ destination restaurant experiences if it means you don’t eat at places not on the World’s 50 Best list

With fine-dining restaurants striving to make a spot on the numerous awards lists out there, many are looking more and more generic

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Eating at Michelin-star restaurants on vacation is all well and good, but you’re missing out if that’s your plan for every meal, Charmaine Mok says. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 4:45pm, 2 Feb 2023

A friend and I once joked that we should create an “instead” list for tourists coming to Hong Kong, because so many travel guides and magazine articles parroted each other when it came to recommending restaurants.

You don’t need another Hong Kong guide to tell you to eat at Yardbird or The Chairman. But for many of these publications, it seems it’s just easier to promote something that already has a huge following.

The advent of awards lists, like the World’s 50 Best, created a circular ecosystem where the restaurants that already got more bums on seats, usually with a great PR team and supportive tourism board, were most likely to climb higher up the rung.

Looking at a gallery of dishes from the World’s 50 Best’s top 10 restaurants, a fellow food writer commented that they couldn’t tell which restaurant was which, or even what cuisine they represented.

Sauce commas, vibrant green oils, edible flowers and items laid jauntily to the side of the plate have become an all-too-common visual vernacular of contemporary fine dining.

In October 2022, Eric Finkelstein, a 34-year-old IT consultant, broke the world record for dining at the most number of Michelin-star restaurants in a single day, eating at 18. Guinness World Records confirmed the feat, which beat the previous record by six restaurants, on December 29.

Eric Finkelstein at Noda, in New York, one of the 18 Michelin-star restaurants he visited in one day to set a Guinness World Record. Photo: Eric Finkelstein

On a similar scale, someone I once met boasted about having eaten multiple omakase sushi meals in one evening in Japan. Others show me their dining itineraries for trips abroad, with every lunch and dinner filled with a constellation of Michelin-star venues.