Michelin Madness

The Guide Michelin, France’s foremost restaurant guidebook, unveiled its annual list of ratings two weeks ahead of schedule last week to squelch panic among top chefs and food critics. It was the first time the prestigious guide with the red cover has jumped the gun on its official March 1 release date.

“We wanted to cut short the rumors,” said spokesman Jean-Frederic Douroux at Michelin’s travel publishing arm.

The talk was apparently spooked by rumored wholesale changes instigated by the guide’s new editor, Derek Brown, a Michelin veteran of more than 30 years, who comes from England. Brown took his post last year but had yet to oversee a full edition.

In the new guide, Michelin raised three restaurants from two stars to the maximum rating of three, bringing the total number of the gastronomically faultless to 23. The guide rewarded Paris chefs Christian Le Squer at Ledoyen and Guy Savoy, whose restaurant of the same name stands near the Arc de Triomphe, as well as Jean-Georges Klein for his skill at the helm of L’Arnsbourg in rural northeastern France.

Emile Jung saw his three-star Le Crocodile in Strasbourg slip to two-star status.

Douroux declined to expand on the speculation regarding the guide, but media reports said the gastronomic rumor mill had been churning overtime due to Brown’s arrival at the helm of the culinary Bible.

Speculation about who is in or out grips the rarefied world of French haute cuisine every year for as much as three months before the release of the guide, which can make or break reputations by awarding or withdrawing a single little star in its chart.

With such high stakes, rumors and leaks alike are eagerly anticipated. “This time it was worse because, with the change of boss, the anxiety was amplified by a sense of the unknown,” said Jean Miot, gastronomic critic at the French daily Le Figaro. “It was even more intense because he is British.”