Top restaurants rocked by coronavirus lockdown but Michelin guide says it’s business as usual

The most prestigious of them all, the Michelin, insists that it is business as usual, with new director Gwendal Poullennec saying that great chefs “have not lost their talent during the lockdowns”.

“They have been innovating and creating new recipes,” he said, adding that his inspectors were chomping at the bit “with impatience and an appetite to try them out when restaurants reopen”.

Yet with only 13 per cent of Michelin-starred restaurants open across 32 countries, the guide’s critics and rivals have questioned the move, with chefs who have already lost millions in custom also worried about losing their precious stars.

Michelin’s main rival, the Gault & Millau, said it was time to stand by and support restaurants who are “in great danger”.

Its director Jacques Bally said they have shelved their chef, pastry chef and sommelier wine waiter of the year awards, but the 2021 guide will appear as normal in October.

With drastic social distancing measures in restaurants likely when they do reopen, “our responsibility as a guide is to highlight what is being done and what possibly can be done,” Bally said. “The next 18 months are going to be extremely difficult and dangerous for restaurants.”

The guide is also going to spotlight chefs who have shown a social conscience during the crisis as well as those who have experimented with click and collect, oven-ready meals or even starred chefs offering to go to their customers homes and cook for them.