The Michelin Guide, the standard bearer for excellence in the restaurant business, made two major mistakes in this year’s inaugural Texas Guide: honoring the wrong of two similarly named restaurants with the same owner and adding a restaurant to the guide that has been permanently closed.
The Michelin Guide making mistakes every once in a while is actually not unheard of. The more egregious mistake this year — honoring the wrong restaurant — also happened in France in 2017. While Dallas restaurants The Charles and Mister Charles share an owner, a similar enough vibe and stand just three miles apart; the French restaurants in question shared a name and eerily similar street addresses, but that’s about it.
The Bouche à Oreille (Word of Mouth) in Bourges, France, a small, inexpensive lunch-only bistro, was awarded a Michelin star meant for a Bouche à Oreille, an upscale establishment two hours away in Boutervilliers, France. The former’s address was on route de la Chapelle, and the latter’s was on rue de la Chapelle. The latter had already received a Michelin star in 2015, so it was likely a matter of mistaken address.
“Of course we don’t like to make mistakes,” a spokesperson for Michelin told The New York Times at the time. “To err is human. The most important thing for us is that neither restaurant was negatively affected.”
Ultimately, the mistake was corrected quickly and the owners of the restaurants met and had a laugh. Plus, through the mishap, the smaller restaurant earned more of its name: word of mouth.
“It’s been spectacular advertising,” owner Véronique Jacquet said then.
The Michelin Guide has been published in some form since 1900, so it’s hard to know if that was the first time such a swap has occurred, but it certainly isn’t the first mistake published. In 2006, after the first San Francisco Guide was published, SFGate ran an article detailing 10 mistakes it had found inside.
Several of those mistakes were listings for permanently closed restaurants, the same thing that occurred in the Texas Guide. Others included naming staff members who had left the restaurant by the time of publishing, falsely crediting a new chef with founding a restaurant, misspellings and key omissions.
There is quite a bit of time between when Michelin reviewers scout restaurants and when the guide is actually published, which can explain some mistakes, but others get at a different aspect of the Michelin review process: it’s an art, not a science.
The Michelin review process is highly secretive, but we do know that it includes sending anonymous full-time Michelin inspectors who pay for their own food to restaurants to evaluate them based on a set of publicly acknowledged criteria:
- Quality of the products
- Mastery of flavor and cooking techniques
- The personality of the chef in his or her cuisine
- Value for money
- Consistency between visits
However, it’s not like inspectors score each criterion out of ten and whichever restaurants earn more than 47 points on average get a star. While the exact process is a secret, Michelin says that ratings are never the result of just one person’s judgement; they are decided by a collective debate and decision.
For the facts included in the guide, such as address, founding year, etc., restaurant owners answer a questionnaire.
Michelin says it rates over 30,000 restaurants across the globe and corrects any mistakes.
In France, the owner of the real starred restaurant received a call informing him of both the error and its remedy before he even knew what was going on. For mistakes that they haven’t caught, Michelin includes a short guide in its website’s FAQ section on how restauranteurs can request corrections.
At the end of the day, while mistakes can be a bummer for restaurants, they’re par for the ten course meal for an enterprise as vast and secretive as Michelin.
