…Michelin is a travel guide, not an award; as such, every restaurant within its designated areas is eligible for stars, like it or not. Michelin’s small army of inspectors—the grand title bestowed on the guide’s staff of professional eaters—is beholden to strict critical guidelines, intended to insure consistency across the various guides. As a result, restaurants pursuing Michelin’s approval tend to implement features that are known to earn high marks: generously spaced tables in the dining room, finely textured napkins, hushed music, white porcelain dishware, finely choreographed service, a French-inflected haute cuisine tasting menu daubed with regional spices and accents and punctuated by gastronomic stunts. The result is a whole class of three-star restaurants that feel, more often than not, like they belong to a global franchise—the Cheesecake Factory with a caviar supplement.
I’ve spent the past few years travelling to Los Angeles as often as possible in order to eat at the city’s brilliant restaurants. It’s occurred to me, more than once, that, as much as the city’s fancy chefs grumble about the lack of Michelin attention, the ultra-high-end restaurants that stand out most in the city are ecstatic departures from the rigid formula that Michelin tends to reward. I’m thinking of a restaurant like Vespertine, a surreal operation housed in an architectural folly in Culver City, where the chef Jordan Kahn serves a four-hour tasting menu that embraces the artistic notion of “difficulty”—a meal that’s intellectually and aesthetically thrilling, even if (by design) not always pleasurable. Ditto n/naka, a California kaiseki restaurant run by the chef Niki Nakayama (whom I profiled earlier this year), which is both exacting and soft—a casual, intimate room in which diners participate in meals of ritualistic formality tempered by bursts of improvisation. Both restaurants are, by my estimation, among the most artful, innovative, and exacting in the world, in large part because they didn’t build themselves specifically to the imposed standards of Michelin, or of anyone else.
