When I go away, I take pictures of street food rather than tourist attractions – I've just been in India, where I spent hours hiding behind a cow's backside trying to get a photograph of a pouri seller without him noticing – so perhaps I'm not the best-qualified person to write about Michelin. Once a peasant always a peasant. But still, it's pleasing to discover that, so far as the Guide goes, the odd crack is at last appearing in its snooty façade. In America, where Michelin has only been plying its uniquely Française trade since 2005 and the response to it has been, shall we say, less than ecstatic, a journalist has been allowed to talk to a current Michelin inspector for the first time, albeit under a cloak of anonymity. John Colapinto, whose piece about this encounter appeared in the New Yorker, met Maxime (not her real name) for lunch in Jean Georges in Manhattan, where he watched her eat foie-gras brûlée followed by Arctic char and then, to finish, some kind of amazingly complex pudding, which, for the sake of brevity, I'm calling a strawberry sponge. What he ate I'm afraid he doesn't reveal.
Colapinto's dispatch from the front line of fine dining is enlightening. His access to Maxime was clearly meant to improve Michelin's image in the US, but critics who have long wondered how one can trust its inspections when one knows so little about how they are carried out, how often and by whom will find scant here to reassure them. Mostly, Maxime sounds vague – "This sauce is really good," she says, the same way any of us might – and when she is not sounding vague she sounds weird and robotic, a foodie version of a Scientologist. When Colapinto asks her about her training (she "trained" in France before returning home to the US, where she served an apprenticeship under two European inspectors), she says: "You've got to go to the mothership to understand the origins of the system" – a statement reminiscent of the gobbledegook John Travolta spouts in Battlefield Earth. Maybe Colapinto didn't eat anything. Maybe he was too frightened.
The first time I ate in a Michelin star, I was a teenager. It was in south-west France. My family had strolled in almost by accident, which shows how long ago this was; nowadays we'd have to book 10 years in advance. I loved it and talked about it for days afterwards, but then it was the 1980s – I'd only recently come to terms with the exciting concept of Findus Crispy Pancakes. Oddly, though, this experience did not spur me to dine at similar establishments whenever I could afford to later on. Partly this is a matter of taste. For instance, I love Italian food. But Italian food is meant to be big in every sense of the word; eat teeny-tiny Michelin-starred Italian food, and afterwards you long for pizza. Also, I prefer to faff about with my own napkin, thank you. Mostly, though, it's to do with my dungaree-wearing tendencies. Don't you find the cult of Michelin a little macho? The more I listen to men ticking off the Michelin-starred establishments they've patronised, the more I want to eat cassoulet on toast and rice pudding. For me, the most amazing thing about Colapinto's scoop is that "Maxime" is a woman, because this is the first time I've encountered a female who has bought into Michelin's "Man-I've-eaten-foie-gras-every-single-day-for-the-past-fortnight!" thing.
Why are men so devoted to Michelin stars? It's their version of label snobbery. Just as some women can only fall in love with a frock if it is by a name, so some men can only enjoy magret de canard if some Michelin inspector has adored the same dish before them. I'm hoping, though, that Maxime might make some of them realise how silly this is. "I mean, cooking is a science, and either it's right or it's wrong," she says at one point. Hmm. This is not quite correct, is it? Yes, if you leave meat to rest, certain things will happen to it, for which there is a good scientific explanation. But if cooking were only a science, a lot more recipes would work, and a lot more restaurants would be good. Cooking is alchemy. The strangest things affect it: the weather, the mood of the person who is rolling the pastry. Besides, even when a dish is as nearly perfect as it is possible, there are still so many other things that affect the way you feel about it. Last summer I, too, ate in a three-star Michelin restaurant in Manhattan – I wasn't paying! – and, yes, I ate a piece of fish so delicious it made me want to rush into the nearest church and howl a hymn. But I won't go there again. I just didn't feel the love: not in the room, which was carpeted like a business-class departure lounge; not in my fellow diners, who had treadmill faces and Chihuahua-size appetites; and certainly not on the chef's morbidly big white plates, which made every minuscule dish seem so horribly anally retentive. OFM
