Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

luxeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 314 posts

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#101

Post by Semaphor »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #95
cameronh90 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scotland does have excellent meat and produce - the Aberdeen Angus and Scottish Salmon for example. The standard of food in the lowlands is generally poor - especially outside of Edinburgh. But there is a lot of absolutely cracking Scottish/British food in the Highlands. Of course, it's not as good for a foodie as somewhere like London, NYC or Tokyo. But it's a lot better than the kebabs, pizza crunches and munchie b…

> But it's a lot better than the kebabs, pizza crunches and munchie boxes that people associate with Scotland. If it's any consolation, the only food I associate with Scotland is haggis, and I don't expect that people there are actually eating it. I have no opinion whatever on what people in Scotland eat. (Except, of course, that it probably isn't haggis.)

Haggis is great, but it certainly is divisive ;)

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#102

Post by bserge »

cameronh90 wrote: post #46
tracerbulletx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez Cheesecake Factory must have really wronged you or something.

As a non-American, I found The Cheesecake Factory baffling. Far more baffling than any other restaurant I've been to in the USA. The restaurants appear to be trying to look fancy, with their extravagant yet tastelessly cheesy interior design. I wasn't sure if it was some kind of ironic inside joke that everyone from the USA is in on? Despite the OTT design, the food was unremarkable. Not too surprising given that the…

It's a cheesecake factory, not a cheesecake atelier. So, like a mass produced car vs handcrafted Rolls Royce :D

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#103

Post by bserge »

blunte wrote: post #74
tayo42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have had food from street vendors and family restaurants that blew my mind Do you have some examples to share?

I'm trying desperately to remember specifics. I love to travel, and food is my #1 or #2 focus when I travel. So I try a lot :). Places and be hit or miss, or at least vary in experience over time or depending upon various factors. But here are some of the ones I can think of, in no particular order. desmaakvanafrika.nl in Rotterdam, NL kuarestaurant.nl in The Hague, NL www.die-kueche-bamberg.de in Bamberg, DE Aum Veg…

Funny how they all have websites. Best food I've had was from small places that seem to survive on foot traffic lol

Could be that the bigger they get, the more people they try to please so the food is kinda less unique.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#104

Post by bserge »

Semaphor wrote: post #101
thaumasiotes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's a lot better than the kebabs, pizza crunches and munchie boxes that people associate with Scotland. If it's any consolation, the only food I associate with Scotland is haggis, and I don't expect that people there are actually eating it. I have no opinion whatever on what people in Scotland eat. (Except, of course, that it probably isn't haggis.)

Haggis is great, but it certainly is divisive ;)

Haggis is exactly what poor hungry me would've come up with and loved :D

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#105

Post by bserge »

Shadonototra wrote: post #27

Title: Confessions of a Michelin Inspector 1st paragraph: We had the great pleasure to speak to Chris Watson, ex-Michelin Guide inspector Is he a Michelin Star Inspector or an ex-Michelin Guide inspector? Who to trust? title or paragraph?

Once a Michelin Inspector, always a Michelin Inspector, I guess

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#106

Post by 1123581321 »

Ansil849 wrote: post #19
tomcam wrote: post #3

Went to Paris and dined at a number of Michelin-starred places, including Le Cinq. The food was fine, but... I didn't get it! I think there is a culinary language that I understand as little as a typical Michelin-starred chef would be able to evaluate a tightly-written C program. On the other hand I was lucky enough to dine at Poppy Seattle every year of its existence and felt their completely original approach to th…

> The food was fine, but... I didn't get it! I think there is a culinary language that I understand as little as a typical Michelin-starred chef would be able to evaluate a tightly-written C program. Correct. I don't know why this is a revelation that seems especially hard for HN audiences to grasp, or why it's a revelation at all. Every single domain has its own expertise. It is absurdly arrogant and deeply condesce…

No one thinks that. It's just market confusion regarding what type of critic is Michelin. There are good critics that don't rate restaurants by their appeal to food nerds/wonks.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#107

Post by ToJans »

As a Belgian consultant I've spent a lot of time on business lunches and dinners, all over Europe.

Big orgs always invited me in Michelin star restaurants. Smaller orgs usually invited me to emerging restaurants or well known local places.

If you mostly care about discovering the second kind, I would strongly suggest you to ignore the stars and take a look at Michelin's "bib gourmand rating" [0]: these are restaurants where you don't have as much protocol, food is reasonably priced, and typically places I would go to when I could choose myself...

[0] https://guide.michelin.com/nl/nl/restaurants/bib-gourmand

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#108

Post by jelliclesfarm »

Having worked in Michelin starred restaurants, we almost always know when an alleged inspector is coming..(there is usually a chart with photos and nicknames in the locker room). the exhilaration and high after the results are out is real. Also..chefs talk. We know. But at that level, it doesn’t matter. Every plate that goes out has to be perfect..has to be impeccable.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#109

Post by kragen »

djur wrote: post #100
kragen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably so, yes, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine cases where the numbers shift around a lot, but the post I was replying to assigned a fixed 1-10 number to each site.

There's nothing about a 1-10 scale that implies that every visit to the restaurant will be equally pleasurable. Novelty is a factor. I would suggest that a sublime restaurant (a 10) will both make a really great first impression and also get tiresome more slowly (because restaurants like that tend to change their menu more dramatically, use a broader variety of ingredients, etc.). My utils from going to Cheesecake Fa…

That's a good point. It might also depend on what the alternative is: the Cheesecake Factory might be much more appealing as an alternative to starvation than as an alternative to a diet consisting entirely of milk and potatoes.

You might have to stretch out the time scale a bit to reach stability, as I suggested in my initial comment: would you rather eat at the Cheesecake Factory once a month than Poppy once every two years, but rather eat at Poppy once a year than at the Cheesecake Factory once a month? (I never went to Poppy; maybe you didn't either.)

Maybe there's no time scale at which those numbers stabilize for you, though, so maybe whether you'd rate Tim Horton higher or lower than the Cheesecake Factory depends on how often you've suffered through their ham and cheese croissants in the last month or year. In that case maybe we have doomed the entire project of rating restaurants on a scalar scale, even a purely ordinal scale like the Mohs scale.

Re: Confessions of a Michelin Star Inspector

#110

Post by Agingcoder »

tomcam wrote: post #3

Went to Paris and dined at a number of Michelin-starred places, including Le Cinq. The food was fine, but... I didn't get it! I think there is a culinary language that I understand as little as a typical Michelin-starred chef would be able to evaluate a tightly-written C program. On the other hand I was lucky enough to dine at Poppy Seattle every year of its existence and felt their completely original approach to th…

Interesting. I see the 'I didn't get it' - the same kind of thing can happen with wine as well, but you start to differentiate / appreciate by eating/drinking it more often. You're essentially training your palate, if you're interested in it obviously .

I give McDonald's and Starbucks a 1 - it doesn't qualify as a meal with any sense of taste whatsoever in my book (I assume restaurant food is edible,and doesn't taste bad, so 1 means 'very bland and uninteresting' ).

Post reply on HN