Threadlines: Why a Tire Company Defines Fine Dining

Stars Are Everything

Pixar's classic animated film, Ratatouille, centers around Gusteau's - an iconic restaurant found in this movie's fictional representation of Paris, France.

In the opening events of the story, Remy the Rat overhears how Anton Ego, one of France's most esteemed yet harsh food critics, recently wrote a highly negative review of Gusteau's restaurant.
Following this publication, Auguste Gusteau's eponymous eatery was downgraded from a five-star establishment (the top-rated designation) to a four-star. Due to the loss of this star, Gusteau was devastated, and the "broken-hearted chef died shortly after."

Remy is shocked at this news, and this event serves as one of the inciting incidents that drive Remy to visit the restaurant in person, eventually becoming the kitchen's unlikely top chef, and proving that really "anyone can cook."

It's a charming movie and one that brings forth waves of nostalgia for many. However, the first time I watched it, I remember being confused…
Why did Gusteau have to die? What was so special about this star rating that the act of losing one of them - directly or indirectly - led to his death?

The Real-World Stars

As I'm sure you can guess, the stars in Ratatouille are meant to serve as an analog for the real-life Michelin star rating system, which awards restaurants one, two, or three stars depending on the judged quality of their menu offerings and dining experience.

Since the system's origin in the early 20th century, the Michelin stars have become idols of aspiring chefs around the world.

The world of fine dining infamously involves high pressure and high stress.¹ Top chefs are under intense scrutiny, working long hours, and running on a brutal treadmill of comparison against similarly-driven chefs.

Getting just one Michelin star is often the life goal of many chefs, causing elation and acclaim if it happens. And in the opposite case, losing a Michelin star can be a severe blow.
Samuel Squires, an English chef, notes that after “getting 3 stars for being the best of the best,” losing a star “would feel like someone ripping your heart out."

Sadly, this pressure has resulted in top chef's mental health taking a beating. And Ratatouille absolutely got it right; the removal of these stars is a brutal blow to those chefs. Gordon Ramsay, the famously brash celebrity chef, remembers "I started crying when I lost my stars."
In the most shocking and tragic cases of this, the Washington Post reports, "After two Michelin-starred chefs — Benoit Violier and Bernard Loiseau — died by suicide in 2016 and 2003, respectively, those who knew them speculated that the pressure of maintaining their rankings may have played a role in the tragedies."

But what even are these Michelin stars? How are they decided? How did they come about and become so important to chefs around the world?
This article will dive into the history and development of the Michelin star system to try and answer some of those questions.

Michelin, the tire company?

You likely have heard of the company behind the Michelin star before, though you may not have realized it… because it's not a company in the food world.
If you've seen any advertisements featuring that big puffy dude made up of what looks like a bunch of white tires stacked on top of each other - that's the Michelin Man, the mascot of the Michelin tire company.

And yes, that’s the same Michelin that publishes the food guide. But we’ll get to that.

As the story goes, in the early days of the French-based tire company, brothers Édouard and André Michelin were at a product exhibition in Lyon, France. As they looked at the stack of tires they were showing off to attendees, they noticed that if you added arms and legs to the stack, it almost looked humanoid... and thus the idea for the Michelin Man was born.

Over the next 120 years of the Michelin tire company, the Michelin Man - also known as Bibendum - has remained a mainstay as the mascot of the firm, and is now an internationally recognized symbol.

Following their creation of the Michelin Man, the entrepreneurial Michelin brothers sought to grow their tire business in France.
However, they quickly ran into a unique challenge - as Alex Mayyasi writes: "The brothers had a superior product: one of the first air-filled tires, which could be quickly replaced since it was not glued to the wheel... But France had only around 350 cars in 1895."
Herbert Lottman explains in his book The Michelin Men, that automobiles “remained rich men’s toys… unable to stray very far from the vicinity of a reliable repair shop.”

Simply, if no one was driving cars, no one needed the Michelin tires, no matter how great they were.
To combat this, the Michelin brothers set out to drive (pun intended) more folks onto the road and into cars.

They figured - the more folks driving around France, the more folks who would need cars, and the more folks who would need tires - specifically their Michelin tires.

A Guide to Put Frenchmen on the Road

So, the two brothers developed the idea for a guidebook, published under the Michelin name, that provided all the necessary information to take a driving tour through France.

This was almost 600 pages of information such as maps, where to refill gas, how to repair your car, where to stay, and as you may have guessed... where to eat along the way.

Mayyasi notes "For drivers, that information was essential. Gas stations did not yet exist, so drivers needed to know which pharmacies sold gasoline in several-liter containers. Motorists needed the timetables that listed when the sun set during the year, because highways did not yet have lights. Only a fraction of auto repair shops stayed open all year, which made it crucial to know which closed at the end of summer. Details like this distinguished the Michelin Guide from the tour books of the time, which assumed that people traveled by rail."

In the preface to this very thorough guidebook that was introduced in 1900, the Michelin brothers declared that this guidebook would have an impact that would last for a century.
Prescient.

The company distributed the guidebook across the country, giving tens of thousands of copies out for free, hoping to convince French men and women that the automobile was the better way of life.

The Michelin Guide Focuses on Food

Within 30 years, the Michelin Guide had developed the concept of starring certain restaurants, indicating a restaurant that was worth a stop.

Soon after, the book introduced the two and three-star rankings, rounding out their rating system.
This system has remained unchanged 90+ years later.

As mentioned, one star means the restaurant was worthy of a stop if you were passing by it; two stars means the establishment was worth going out of your way for; and three stars was the highest acclaim, denoting a restaurant with "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

In the remaining decades of the 1900s, the Michelin tire company continued to expand, and with it, the Michelin Guide.

Over time, drivers around France and the world began to enjoy conveniences such as dedicated gas stations and lit highways. And with the evolving driving ecosystem, came an increased focus from readers on the restaurant part of the guide as they needed the maps and other guides less and less.²

So, the Michelin Guide also evolved, pouring more and more resources into building out their restaurant reviews.
During this time of investment, the company built out its anonymous and mysterious restaurant inspection system, which has proved key to the success of the reviews.

Throughout the 1900s, many similar books popped up throughout Europe to rival the Michelin Guide, but they all fell short of eclipsing the original one. Over the decades, the Michelin Guide continued to enjoy growing popularity each year.

Soon enough, restaurants around France, and then the world, began to rely on the guide as the prominent and most respected source of fine dining advice.

Michelin Dominates

Now, the Michelin Guide has become the de facto source of truth for excellence in the restaurant industry and is the north star for most chefs around the world.

French chef Paul Bucose said it clearly: "Michelin is the only guide that counts."

This renown has come about for two main reasons.

First, the unique setup of the Michelin Guide being published by a non-food-industry company allows to be a respected, fully independent guide.

The Michelin Guide is supported by funds unrelated to the financials of the guide itself. Michelin can continue to invest in the guide every year, paying for inspectors to travel the world and try hundreds of restaurants to determine their worth and excellence, as they have money constantly flowing in from their "normal" business of tires.
Michelin doesn't have to worry about monetizing the guide and can publish it at a loss because… it's not their main business.
For instance, Michelin doesn't allow restaurants to pay to be featured in the guide. For many publications that highlight pieces of media or culture, it’s common practice to receive payment in exchange for features. Michelin can eschew this, ensuring that readers can trust that nothing is getting in the way of curating the finest list of restaurants possible.

Second, the Michelin Guide is respected because of its robust and principled inspection process.

John Colapinto writes in the New Yorker, "Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company's top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists."

Michelin inspectors are not meant to be wined and dined and treated to the best possible service. They are meant to blend in and have the dining experience of the restaurant that any other diner would. This reality enables the Michelin Guide to publish ratings that are trusted by readers as truly authentic.

These two factors make it so that the Michelin Guide is viewed as this incorruptible, trustworthy source of fine dining excellence.

Why Chefs Care

Now, put yourself in the shoes of an aspiring haute cuisine chef. You want to cook great food, curate a great dining experience, and share those things with your guests. You want to start your own venture, but you have no way of getting folks to be excited to eat at your establishment.
Then you look at the restaurants with Michelin Stars and see that anyone who is awarded a star has waitlists for weeks, months, and even years.³

So, you realize... I gotta earn a Michelin Star.

Of course, there are other avenues for a chef to share great food with guests. Jon Favreau's 2014 movie Chef demonstrates this truth well as it follows a high-end Los Angeles chef who leaves a position at a top restaurant to launch a food truck business selling Cuban sandwiches. Good food can be found everywhere, not just at expensive, well-respected restaurants.

However, in the world of fine dining specifically, the Michelin Star is the way to garner respect and have folks clamoring to get into your restaurant. A Michelin Star is an automatic ticket to have diners filling up your restaurant. On top of this, it's the ultimate mark of respect in the fine dining world. Earning a Michelin Star signifies that - for those who make careers out of creating and curating sophisticated menus - they have done a good job of that.

Because of this, chefs around the world spend their careers working to earn that coveted Michelin Star. With it, comes prestige, pride, and guaranteed business.

However, it's not all good.

Pressures, Expectations, and Competition

Fine dining is an intense competitive, intensely personal pursuit. The pursuit of a Michelin Star puts many chefs through the wringer, working 12+ hour days, with little to no personal time or rest.

Dominique Crenn, executive chef at a 3-Michelin-Star restaurant, said "We work 18 hours a day, every day, under pressure to feed thousands of people a perfect meal, and one person can walk into the restaurant and put you down, or a writer can judge you for using too much salt."

Chefs spend weeks upon weeks, slaving away just to please a group of anonymous critics. And for chefs who don't receive their coveted Star, it can be a severe setback.

Kris Hall, founder of an advocacy campaign on mental health in the restaurant industry, said "It’s lonely being a chef... Chefs are stoic, strong individuals. They’re meant to be very resilient, as well, which means that we’ve sort of been trained … not to show any signs of ‘weakness...’ You’ll hear stories … of people who have cut themselves or burned themselves quite severely, and they will continue through service in order to get the job done.”

Because of the extremely high expectations and intense competition that comes inherent with earning a Michelin Star rating, some top chefs have begun to reject their stars and demand that they be removed from their restaurants. This is due to a growing sentiment that the expectations of the system are restrictive and unreasonable.

Chris Duffy, the executive chef at a 2-Michelin-Star restaurant, recalls that “We were talking about putting a piece of china down and making sure that it was perfectly an inch from the edge of the table, and just…going into extreme lengths. And I think that could break somebody."

In popular culture, the extreme nature of fine dining has reached a point of parody. Look to 2022's black comedy, The Menu.

This movie sees "A small group of people pay astronomical sums to be isolated on an island, fed ingredients that wash up on the beach by employees who are trapped there, and subjected to the hospitality of a creative visionary who is secretly filled with rage." And while this description sounds over-the-top, "the consensus was that the tropes of modern fine dining are so extreme that there’s little need to exaggerate them."

The Menu highlights how becoming a top chef requires such a level of focus, pride, and idiosyncrasy that only the most passionate chefs will rise to the top. And as the adage goes... there is a fine line between passion and insanity.

As modern fine dining restaurants compete for acclaim (and Michelin Stars), they have turned into this kind of ridiculous treadmill of trying to out-cook and out-perfect each other with fancier and more artistic offerings.

While there is much to critique about the dramatic, competitive, and intensely serious world of fine dining, it remains fascinating how Michelin has implanted itself firmly at the center of that world with their guide. And now, talented, driven, brilliant chefs around the world fight tooth and nail for the recognition of a tire company.

Thinking back to the wonderful Ratatouille, the film effectively highlighted many of the intricacies in the world of fine dining. Chefs really do work under the intense pressure we see in Gusteaus's kitchen, food critics really do have as much power as the villainous Anton Ego, and the stars the restaurant earns - or doesn't earn - really do mean that much to the chefs.

Over the past century, the Michelin Guide has developed from a publication that two entrepreneurial brothers created to encourage French people to drive more automobiles, to becoming the most respected fine dining guide in the entire world.
Truly an unpredictable journey.

¹ This clip from Hulu’s The Bear highlights the crazy, high-pressure nature of a kitchen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1K3z62yoiOA&pp=ygUQVGhlIGJlYXIgeWVsbGluZw%3D%3D

² The Michelin Guide was used as a map during WW2: 
“In spring 1944, while the formidable fleet which would land in Normandy was being organized in England, the Allied Forces feared that their progression would be delayed in French cities where all signage had been taken down or destroyed. After painstaking research and with the go-ahead of the Michelin Paris management, it was decided that the 1939 edition of the Guide – the last on record – would be reprinted. The complete edition, with its hundreds of detailed, up-to-date city maps, was printed in Washington, DC, and distributed amongst the officers. The only difference from the 1939 French edition was the mention on the cover stating ‘For official use only’. So it was that on D-Day the troops which would liberate Bayeux, Cherbourg, Caen, St. Lo and France itself landed with the Michelin Guide in hand. Most of these D-Day landing guides have been lost or destroyed in the bombings, others were taken back to the USA by soldiers returning home; there are very few known originals left in Europe. They differ from the initial 1939 edition in that the cover is less rigid, the colour is a lighter, pinkish red, the tyre insert is lacking and there are some comments in English on the cover.
In addition, after the liberation of Paris, the Boulevard Pereire bureaus printed over two million maps of the north and east of France, Belgium, and Germany, which the Allied Forces used to facilitate the armies’ progression."

³ "Earn two or even three and the restaurant is virtually guaranteed to be booked out for months in advance by a never-ending list of foodies and celebrities." - Michelin Star History: Story of the Legendary Michelin Guide (ultimatedrivingtours.com)