Michelin Guide

The 2009 edition of the Michelin guide is out, and Providence in Hollywood has been added to the list of L.A.'s two-star restaurants. Providence received one star last year in the much-criticized debut edition of the Michelin guide for Los Angeles. Providence joins the ranks of Melisse, Spago and Urasawa, which each received two stars last year and retained their stars this year. Still no three-star restaurants in L.A. This year, Hatfield's, Bastide and Osteria Mozza each get one star (they weren't on the one-star list last year)

THE restaurant world's most famous little red book -- the Michelin Guide -- will be coming to Southern California this fall. In fact, inspectors are already hard at work here, touring the area's best restaurants and filling out score sheets. In addition to the Southern California guide, Michelin will also be introducing a separate guide for Las Vegas this October as well as one for Tokyo that was announced two weeks ago. These books continue Michelin's push into international publishing.

THE Bay Area has gained two Michelin-rated two-star restaurants -- and they're not in San Francisco. In the just-released second edition of the "Michelin Guide San Francisco, Bay Area and Wine Country," Chez TJ, the 25-year-old French restaurant in the South Bay city of Mountain View, jumped from one star to two, and the Restaurant at Meadowood resort in Napa Valley's St. Helena received two stars right out of the gate.

Restaurateurs and chefs across Southern California were congratulating one another Friday on their Michelin ratings, even though the highly anticipated restaurant guide -- the first ever for Los Angeles -- wasn't scheduled to be announced until Monday. Some chefs already had figured out a way to access the list of starred restaurants on the Michelin guide website in advance of the official announcement.

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.

TO celebrate his brother's recent marriage, Santa Monica resident Ravinder Singh recently got together with about 200 of his nearest and dearest, half in Southern California and the rest in India. While revelers here savored a dinner of chicken tikka masala, tandoori chicken, basmati rice and naan, the party-goers in India enjoyed breakfast.

In France, one chef shot himself after rumors that his Michelin stars might be downgraded. Another grew so weary of the pressure that he closed his elite restaurant to open a homier one and shake the star system. (He couldn't. Michelin bestowed them on him anyway.) On Monday, the famed dining guide created by the tire company 106 years ago came to the Bay Area -- only the second North American launch, after last year's New York debut.

For the first time in its 105-year history, Michelin is recalling an edition of its famous food guide after it recommended a restaurant whose rating was determined before it served customers. The 2005 guide for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg recommended the Ostend Queen in Belgium as a stop for diners looking to eat decently without great expense.

So, for the third year in a row, the coveted, eagerly awaited, zealously guarded Michelin Guide ratings for restaurants in France leaked early last week. This time the leak came when a bookstore in Corsica unpacked its Michelin boxes and put the books on display a week ahead of schedule and the local newspaper published a story on the three-star changes.

EVERY August at the end of the beach holiday that I take with my family on the bland Connecticut coast, my New York-born husband somehow manages to assert his essential urban self. Just as we cross the border into the Bronx, he stops the car. The pretense is to find a bathroom or gas, but inevitably he ends up with the same reassuring trophy -- a slice of piping-hot, thin-crusted, cheese-sliding pizza from a no-name hole in the wall on Broadway.