Copyright channelnewsasia
It’s worth pausing to ask: How do awards like Michelin and 50 Best work, and who decides these things, anyway? The Michelin Guide relies on anonymous inspectors who visit restaurants multiple times before awarding or revoking a star. Their official five criteria: Quality of products, mastery of techniques, personality of the chef in the cuisine, value for money, and consistency between visits. How many visits? Which inspectors? What cultural lenses do they bring? And, why is there a single, lonely hawker stall with a star? Michelin likes to keep an air of mystery about these details. The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, meanwhile, runs on votes. More than 1,000 voters – a mix of chefs, restaurateurs, critics and “well-travelled gourmets” – each cast 10 votes, at least four outside their home region. Transparency has improved, but it’s still a network-driven system. Think Oscars: Prestige, influence, lobbying, visibility and zeitgeist matter. For diners, both systems answer, “What is best?” although not necessarily, “What is relevant to me right now?” But, ranking systems do provide a framework of reference to facilitate discourse and decision-making. Michelin-starred Singaporean fine-dining restaurant Labyrinth’s chef-owner LG Han gives this analogy: “Michelin and 50 Best awards are like having bullets for your gun, assuming the business is your gun. Without a trigger, the gun is useless. Having a gun with the bullets without a trigger does not equate success. But, would you rather have the bullets?”
