Rating culinary chaos

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. Instinctively, he holds the pizza one-handed on wax paper, folds it horizontally, cocks his head to the left and slurps what he’s been yearning for throughout our vacation: New York soul food.

I can’t help but think of this lip-smacking ritual just as a crack team of European gastronomes is dispersing stealthily around the five boroughs in quest of its own particular version of New York gastronomic heaven. Instead of discarded greasy wax paper, though, what they will leave in their wake is a long-awaited red volume: the first-ever Michelin Guide to food and hotels in an American city, in this case New York, N.Y.

The legendary French tire company, whose star-rating system defines destination eating for hungry but demanding travelers in Europe, expects to have its New York edition on sale by mid-November. If this exotic venture goes well, Michelin plans to take on more of the New World during the next five years.

It was probably easier for Alexis de Tocqueville to summarize the American character in the 19th century than it will be for the Michelin inspectors to get their arms around the culinary chaos of 21st century New York. The Big Apple has 18,000 restaurants, and no, you can’t ignore the vast number of Greek diners because you might find better pastrami on rye at the coffee shop on Broadway and 75th Street than at the legendary Katz’s on the Lower East Side. That’s just the way it goes when it comes to eating in this town: infinite excellence, infinite variety in every neighborhood.

Since the existing local guides cover so much greater territory, it’s a wonder how Michelin, with its specific and famously exacting standards, will winnow its New York list to a mere 500. In Paris, it’s down to 399, but then Michelin has been refining the art of critical eating on its home turf since 1900.

Five Michelin inspectors have actually been hard at work here since late October, exercising their tasting talents at 1,400 pre-selected restaurants. According to Michelin director Jean-Luc Naret, who was in New York last week meeting with his food sleuths, his crew has checked out 800 restaurants. They encompass every corner of the city, from the Bronx to Staten Island, he says. With no less than 10 years’ experience eating for the company, Naret’s inspectors have also been allowed the freedom to sample spots not on the master list. When the results are in, restaurants will be organized by neighborhood and cross-referenced by category.

It’s at this stage that an additional two American inspectors are to be recruited to add their native taste buds to the task at hand.

Once the final roster of places that deserve up to three stars -- the number awarded for highest quality -- is ready, those establishments will be revisited anonymously several times, Naret explains, before the guide goes to press.

Naret recognizes that there are favorite haunts like Burger Joint in the Le Parker Meridien that are hard for a Frenchman to fathom, as well as peculiar customs such as our charming local habit of eating quickly.

“In Paris, you go to a restaurant and it’s expected that you take over that little piece of real estate for the next three to four hours,” he says. “Here, they’re setting the table for the next guest before you’re even done.”

RETURNING to his hotel Wednesday night after an all-day secret meeting with the inspectors, Naret got a whiff of curry from a well-known food cart at 54th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. “Wow, it was great to see people outside queuing in the cold,” he says. “I’m not sure such a trolley will be noted in the guide, but at least we understand it’s a country and city where you find all kinds of experiences.”

In fact, 20 years ago, Michelin attempted to produce an American guide but never brought the project to publication. The effort to annex U.S. territory, it seems, proved overwhelming at the time. Since then the company has extended its reach, now successfully publishing a dozen guides covering 20 European cities, and feels ready to go across the pond. “We are not as much a French guide anymore as we are an international company,” Naret says. And coming to New York -- as he puts it, “the capital of the world in terms of gastronomy” -- is a crucial element of the expansionist claim.

But like so many revered and seemingly pristine institutions, this one has had its share of scandals, with a former inspector revealing in a book how the Michelin ranking procedures may not be quite as inflexibly rigorous as the company would have its devotees believe. And, shockingly, last year the Belgian version recommended a restaurant that had yet to open.

True to their always self-protective instincts, New York restaurateurs have taken note of these embarrassing occurrences. While they are far too savvy to go on the record, in talking with them, the impression one comes away with is of ennui about yet another set of critics working off yet another set of standards to evaluate their hometown.

Steve Duong, proprietor of Nam in Tribeca, seemed baffled by why the French would bother with the culinary cacophony of New York. His Reade Street eatery, along with a second Asian hot spot he co-owns in Chelsea, is totally New York Now. Who knows what makes a restaurant hip? Maybe it’s the ceiling fans and old photographs on the walls at Nam. Certainly, reasonable prices for fantastic steamed sea bass over mushrooms or delicious crispy snapper are only a part of the recipe.

Duong seems skeptical that the French could ever comprehend the New York scene. “I’m not fusion, I’m not French Vietnamese. I just hope they’ll understand me as traditional Vietnamese and not as something you eat in a French colony....We, in New York, are very knowledgeable, very intelligent of our own tastes.”

Frankly, Duong is not even sure why Michelin is bothering to set up this transatlantic outreach. “I guess a Michelin Guide here will be good for me to get European tourists,” he says, “if they bother to leave Midtown.”

Perhaps local chowhounds are right to be suspicious of the Michelin template that indisputably favors the traditional in “fine dining.” After all, its Paris guide has rarely given stars to restaurants with non-French cuisine. What will such Franco fussbudgets make of New York’s array of ethnic and neighborhood places? Eating here is more than snagging a table at Per Se or Masa or Le Bernardin.

Already, names of places (those three in particular) likely to score three stars are being bandied about. One possibility is that once the final list has been published and after the inevitable furor has died down, the “2006 Michelin Guide to New York City” may, in the end, only affect the fiercely competitive, outrageously expensive Midtown Manhattan eating scene.

Thus, the pizza slurpers among us are probably just indulging in foolish fantasy to imagine that Michelin will find its way to MeKong on Prince Street for some shredded chicken salad or out to Flushing for a piece of Korean barbecue or over to Brooklyn’s Avenue J in Flatbush for a piping-hot slice on wax paper. A New York slice and a Yoo-hoo, that’s worth three stars.