When the Michelin Star becomes a restaurant’s curse
Summary
For some chefs, achieving the industry’s most prestigious award can come with a litany of drawbacks and harm a restaurant’s bottom line.
Last fall, the restaurant Giglio in Lucca, Italy, made a surprising request: to have its Michelin star removed from the 2025 guide. The Tuscan eatery had been awarded the star in 2019 for its traditional Italian food with a modern flair, such as potatoes with squid sauce, chanterelles and spicy parsley. Then came new clientele with heightened expectations. The owners, who desired a more relaxed environment, had come to think of the award as a burden.
“Such recognition represents the highest achievement a young chef can aspire to," said Stefano Terigi, a chef at Giglio. “We didn’t have time to figure out if it was truly our path; we didn’t seek it out."
For more than a century, the Michelin Guide has functioned as a culinary lodestar for chefs the world over, bringing them international customers and fame that has led to cookbooks, kitchen products and more. The French tire-company’s guides have expanded across the world, creating yearly regional guides listing top-notch dining spots as determined by the company’s anonymous taste-testers. Now, some chefs say the prestigious award can become a gilded cage for restaurants loaded with financial and creative drawbacks.
While not every restaurant listed in the guides achieves a star, a select few are awarded between one to three stars, a distinction regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for a chef. Every year, the company rolls out their regional guides in ceremonies all over the world; on Monday, the 2025 guide for the United Kingdom and Ireland, which represents one of the larger-scale locales, was feted at an event in Glasgow.
“In some respects [a star] can be a little stifling," said Scott Nishiyama, the chef and owner at Ethel’s Fancy in Palo Alto, Calif., who trained under Michelin-star chefs before opening his own restaurant. He said the possibility of a Michelin inspector walking through the door at any moment could be unnerving: “You don’t have that necessary freedom or joy to make discoveries and to make mistakes because you’re simply worried about losing that star, or trying to achieve that first star."
A star could also harm a restaurant’s income, said Simon Olesen, who runs the popular brasserie Møntergade in Copenhagen, which was listed without stars in the 2024 Denmark guide. He said that many workers expending meals to their employers would avoid restaurants that appear too extravagant. Some corporate types “probably eat here three times a week," Olesen said. “If we got the star and they were not allowed to come, they’re not going to spend their private money because they prefer eating here."
Being recognized is a “free recommendation" for restaurants that are outside of major cities or don’t have the resources to advertise, said Gwendal Poullennec, the Michelin Guide’s international director. “The Michelin Guide is a real blessing," he said. “We put a spotlight on talent."
Poullennec says restaurants don’t get to opt out of being recognized by Michelin, despite efforts from places such as Giglio, the Italian eatery whose clientele changed after their award. “Often they didn’t come for us but for the star," said Terigi, the Giglio chef. “We felt a little depersonalized."
Poullennec regards restaurants who try to return their star as anomalies. In the six years that Poullennec has held his position, he estimates he has dealt with four instances of restaurants no longer wishing to retain their star, out of the hundreds that are awarded annually. He suspects that some of these restaurants may no longer be operating at a star-level and believe they are about to lose it. Despite Michelin’s stance that restaurants do not get to decide on their star-status, Giglio is still listed online in the guide, but no star appears next to its name.
Although the Michelin Guide says that only factors such as quality of cooking and mastery of technique are considered, some restaurant owners including Olesen feel they would need to maintain perfection at every level in exchange for a star, down to the ply of the toilet paper in the bathrooms.
This can make it hard to run a restaurant, owners say. A star can lead to an uptick in business and sales, but a slump almost inevitably follows, according to a 2021 report on the impact of the Michelin star on restaurants in New York City published in the Strategic Management Journal, a research publication. For some places, this can be a fatal blow, as they struggle to sustain new costs such as higher-quality ingredients, rising rents from landlords who re-evaluate their property and staff who demand pay commensurate with their perceived newfound value, the report said.
“If I wanted to get myself to that caliber [of a star], it would require a lot more time and energy on my end to put that together," said Justin Kent, an American chef who trained with the esteemed David Toutain and Alain Passard before opening his own Paris eatery, Milagro, which was featured without a star in France’s 2024 guide.
It would also be an investment financially, Kent said, one that he has seen drain fellow chefs who have had difficulty maintaining the newfound costs once they’ve achieved the star’s golden status.
“I’m very happy with my life the way it is," he said. Kent regularly brings his tiny dog Tofu to work, delighting the customers.
