Early review hard to swallow

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. In Michelin terms, the award attributed was a “Bib Gourmand” -- less coveted than the guide’s gastronomic stars but still a potential client draw.

Trouble is, the guide settled on the recommendation before the restaurant had opened for business.

“The restaurant was not yet open,” Michelin spokeswoman Michelle Pierson said in an interview. Under normal procedures, “We should visit establishments after their official opening.”

Ostend Queen co-owner Fernand David said the Benelux chief editor visited “when the project was at an advanced stage. He talked to us and said, ‘It would be a pity if we kept this establishment from the users of the guide.’ ”

“Now there are insinuations that there has been a deal, but we don’t see it that way,” Belgium’s De Morgen newspaper quoted David as saying. “I really don’t see what the fuss is about.”

Pierson conceded that Michelin, which has sold more than 30 million guides since the first one covering France was published in 1900, had fallen short of its standards. But she added, “There’s no cronyism here.”

“We have a very strict quality processes, precisely to be reliable, and here apparently the process was not followed to the letter,” she said.

In initially recommending the Ostend Queen, Michelin’s Belgian team “thought they had sufficient elements in the dossier about who was doing the cooking, what was going to be on the menu and all these details like that,” she said.

But the decision was later revisited and “bookstores are being informed that the Benelux guide is withdrawn from sale because there was an error regarding the attribution of a Bib Gourmand,” Pierson said. A replacement guide should be out within two months, she said.