It's amateur hour chez Michelin

The seven geographic areas the guide covers are weird in themselves -- Beverly Hills (which includes Bel-Air); "Greater Downtown" (including Chinatown and Koreatown); Hollywood (which picks up "Midtown" and West Hollywood); Pasadena; Santa Monica Bay; Ventura Boulevard (which includes Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Westlake Village) and "Westside." Weirder still, the areas are color-coded, but in only two colors -- green and different green.

American inspectors

Weirdest of all is that nowhere does the book explain that inclusion in the guide is, in itself, a recommendation. I learned that last Wednesday evening, when I participated in a panel discussion about the guide at Barnes & Noble at the Grove. Jean-Luc Naret, director of Michelin guides, was also a panelist, as was Barbara Fairchild, editor in chief of Bon Appetit; it was moderated by Evan Kleiman, chef-owner of Angeli Caffe and host of "Good Food" on KCRW-FM (89.9).

Fairchild and I pressed Naret to explain as much as he would about the inspectors and how decisions were made. There are five inspectors, he said, all Americans, employed full-time by Michelin to cover Los Angeles and Las Vegas (the Las Vegas guide was published Friday). Before being hired, each was invited to dine in a restaurant with Michelin brass, and after the meal the prospective inspector was given a questionnaire to fill out that was used to determine whether his or her expertise was adequate.

The inspectors, Naret said, "are people in the industry" -- former restaurant managers or sommeliers, but not chefs, who might be recognized.

He clarified that not all of L.A. is covered in this first guide -- only the seven areas outlined above. That explains why the marvelous Chinese restaurants of the San Gabriel Valley were ignored, but raises the question: Why Agoura Hills over Alhambra? The decision seems clueless.

To choose the restaurants that would be included, a "pre-selection" of 900 restaurants was assembled. How did they do that? "We choose the pre-selection by looking at newspapers and magazines," Naret said, gesturing in my direction. For L.A., 263 made it into the guide.

To whittle them down, an inspector dined at each of the 900 restaurants, eliminating some along the way. Then another inspector dined at any that were considered to be included in the guide. "If we find a potential star," Naret said, "we visit two, three, four, five times." A potential three-star restaurant is visited 12 times by 12 different inspectors. (There are only 10 inspectors in the U.S., so presumably that means inspectors come from Europe.) A restaurant given two stars is visited six to eight times, Naret said.