EARTH to Michelin: Wolfgang Puck is not the guy making your Wiener schnitzel at Spago, there are better Chinese restaurants in town than Yang Chow, and Agoura Hills isn't exactly a hotbed of culinary excellence.
The famous red guides for restaurants in Europe published by the French tire company may have lost their luster in recent years, even as the company embarked on a plan to expand to cover the world, but nothing could have prepared this food-loving Angelena for what's in the pages of the just-published Michelin Guide Los Angeles 2008. In short, it's amateurish, confusing and barely credible.
Yes, this is a debut guide, but if it's the best Michelin can do after learning from its mistakes with New York and San Francisco launches in the last couple of years, the future doesn't look very bright for its publishing arm.
Trouble for the red guide started back in 2004, when a former inspector wrote an expose claiming that a third of France's three-star restaurants could never lose a star because they're "untouchable." The next year, the Benelux Michelin edition featured a restaurant that hadn't yet opened. And later in 2005, Alain Senderens, whose Lucas Carton restaurant in Paris had three stars for 28 years, became the third French chef to "renounce" his stars.
Michelin-watchers posited that the company's first U.S. guidebook -- Michelin Guide New York City 2006 -- might rescue its reputation, but it turned out to be filled with mistakes and was skewered by New York magazine and others. By the time Bibendum (Michelin's roly-poly mascot) got to San Francisco last fall, it felt as if a good deal of the air had been let out of his radials.
So I knew better, but somehow found myself swept up in the buzz about the first L.A. guide the week before it was published. Maybe it was all the commotion over the star rankings being leaked (I got wind of it when the assistant to an L.A. chef suggested that Food do a story about her boss, since, as she wrote, he would receive a Michelin star in the coming week). Then there was all the excitement of tracking down where the leak came from, and whether it was real.
It seemed, for a moment, as if it mattered.
And then I read the book.
What shocked me wasn't who did and did not get stars; rather, it was that the book that purports to be the bible of fine dining is so poorly researched and lamely written that the ratings have no credibility.
Embarrassing errors
