Michelin Chooses San Diego for Its Big Show

So, Michelin chose San Diego to host its annual awards show tonight. Big thing for our city, which people wrote off as the flaccid mozzarella stick or the “fish tacos bro” of California food culture.

Michelin Guide is a pretty fascinating story. It started as a marketing brochure for a tire company and evolved into the strongest global marketing platform for restaurant culture in history. In 1900, there were less than 3,000 cars in all of France. André and Édouard Michelin were trying to sell tires. A niche market. If people drove more, they figured, tires would go bald faster. They’d sell more rubber.

So they published a guidebook with maps, gas stations, mechanics, hotels, restaurants, and travel advice. The “How to Go Bald” book with food as the bait. By the 1920s, people were buying the guide just for the restaurant recs. In 1926, Michelin introduced stars. Originally just one. Five years later, it expanded to three. One meant “very good restaurant.” Two meant “worth a detour.” Three stars meant “worth a special journey.” Wear those tires down to a nub in search of Dover sole.

By WWII, Michelin was the gold standard guide to French food. And French food was the gold standard for western food. Michelin first came to the US in 2005 to New York only. Knicks in five.

In 2007, San Francisco, followed by LA and Vegas in 2008. Michelin stopped publishing in LA and Vegas after two years and stayed dark from 2011–2017. Major theories for this? First, print is expensive. I can attest. ROI on a printed story is hard. Second, people wanted local critics, and they were finding them online. Third, Michelin landed like a stuffed shirt in LA, which had taco carts in its heart. LA swiped left.

Then Michelin discovered a new way to fund what it does. Instead of trying to sell enough books to justify the cost (inspectors, printing, restaurant bills, etc.), it had tourism boards pay for inspectors to come analyze their cities or states.

Tourism boards are massive organizations whose sole goal is to market the cities and states—attract tourists, who pay for hotels and spend money in the city. Heads in beds. The first to swipe its TMD (tourism marketing dollars) credit card was California, which paid $600,000 in 2019 for Michelin to come back to LA, Orange County, Monterey, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, and… San Diego.

It’s an overwhelmingly positive thing, which is never without its doubters and critics. Namely, not everyone is down with the pay for play model.

The biggest reason is that it means cities without big tourism budgets get left out. Chefs in those cities are chefs non grata in the eyes of Michelin. Which is a fair complaint, though also, sadly or not, kind of how capitalism works. Michelin isn’t a government organization. It’s a publicly traded company with real bills to pay and investors and shareholders to answer to.

Since it feels like a tad of a PR dilemma for Michelin, I have a proposal that may or may not work. What if Michelin took a portion of the money it receives from larger cities and used it to fund its expansion into an underserved city or state that can’t afford it? Bake it into the price it charges California or any other state. Again, Michelin’s not obligated to do this; there is no penalty beyond the paper cuts of our public sentiment. But that sort of pay-it-forward model could help other cities without the resources to play the game.

Second, people claim this TMD-funded model somehow taints the winners. I don’t buy that at all. All tourism boards are doing is paying a marketing business (Michelin) to come operate in their city. They’re not telling Michelin which restaurants to choose for awards. As I understand it, Michelin has retained independence, and its inspectors only award restaurants that they feel are absolutely worth it based on merit.

True pay for play would be if that restaurant paid Michelin in exchange for being awarded a star. Or if a tourism board paid Michelin to come to a city and had a say in which restaurants received attention or awards. I haven’t found any proof of that happening, and so I won’t ding the validity of the awards until (and if) I ever do.

All tourism boards can control is which areas they’re willing to pay to have analyzed. For instance, San Diego could technically ask that only the city be analyzed and not the county. Which it did not, most likely because Visit San Diego (our TMD) is in charge of marketing the entire county (and thus why Michelin stars like Jeune et Jolie, Lilo, and Addison are outside of SD city limits).

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So, if you’re dead set on criticizing Michelin, I’m not sold yet on the pay-for-play model being the right route.

There are other criticisms, of course. That Michelin mainly rewards high-end restaurants—the “white tablecloth” shrines to microgreens—which ignores the true heart and soul of a city’s food culture (strip mall bánh mì heroes, taco shops, etc.). Michelin has started making an effort to fix that, awarding a star to a taco shop for the first time in 2024 (Taquería El Califa de León in Mexico City).

Another criticism is that Michelin doesn’t have enough inspectors to truly study and analyze a city’s food culture—a claim famously made by former Michelin inspector Pascal Rémy in 2004. Granted, that was 22 years ago, before the company solved the funding problem with tourism marketing dollars. And since Michelin is secretive about its process, there’s no real way to answer that in a provable way.

I overwhelmingly think Michelin’s presence in San Diego is a great thing. It lifts local chefs into the global food media spotlight. I have my reservations as a sentient being who covers the restaurant culture, of course. I do have instinctual doubts that Michelin has enough inspectors who are active enough to truly analyze San Diego’s food culture in a meaningful, thorough way.

But my main hesitancy with Michelin is in its criteria that prioritizes food over all else and deprioritizes ambiance and service. And while the intent of that may come from a pure place (it means that a humbly designed place like Soichi can get a Michelin star and doesn’t need to spend a million dollars on design to qualify), I think it misses the magic and soul of a restaurant.

I don’t go to restaurants purely for the food. Sure, the food must be good, but if it looks like an off-brand Olive Garden with a couple fake plants basking in their own microplastic, I’m probably not going to recommend that place to our audience or friends. I go to the places to escape, feel inspired or charmed (and eat good food). And that charm doesn’t have to cost a lot; one of my favorite spaces in San Diego is Fathom Bistro, which is a glorified hot dog stand with knicknacks.

And service matters a lot. The idea of a restaurant is to feel the hospitable grace of a group of strangers. To be made to feel at home in a special place. If the service is rude (like nearly every craft cocktail place in the aughts), my ranking of that place goes down.

Also, food knowledge matters on the floor. If you’ve got a chef sourcing some of the most compelling ingredients on the planet and doing dozens of cool tricks to them—but a server who says, “I’m not sure what it is—white fish with a sauce”—the experience lacks substance and story. A story is being told in the back by someone who gives a damn, and being lost in translation between the stove and the guest.

Regardless, helping bring the deserving work of San Diego’s food and drink people into the national and international spotlight has always been a personal mission, and both the tourism boards and Michelin have done exactly that.

San Diego hosting the state’s awards show takes a food scene that was once written off as the souvenir cup of California—and gives it the shine it now deserves.

Storylines to Watch Tonight

Lilo

The big question tonight will be whether Lilo gets a second Michelin star. The tasting menu–only concept from chef Eric Bost and restaurateur John Resnick is operating at a two-plus star level, but it’s so brand new that Michelin may wait a year to award that. The restaurant will eventually land in the two- or three-star realm, but to prove its critical analysis (especially after awarding it a star after only being open a month or two last year), feels like it stays at one.

Jeune et Jolie

Does its sister restaurant, Jeune, retain its star? It should. But the fact that Michelin only has awarded stars to five local restaurants (Addison, Jeune et Jolie, Lilo, Valle, and Soichi) and 40 percent of them are one restaurant group with spots across the street from one another, I could see a world in which Jeune (wrongly) gets downgraded due to appearances.

Travis Swikard

Does Travis Swikard get a star? Swikard is undoubtedly one of the top three chefs in the city with Callie and now Fleurette. It seems a gross miss that he’s not already part of the Michelin constellation.

Tara Monsod

Tara gets nominated for a James Beard every year it seems. Her food at Animae, especially, is phenomenal. The room feels like a Michelin room. The curtains are heavy enough to carry the honor. Most of us in the scene would nod “of course” if they hung a star on her door. If analyzing the somewhat cynical strategy that goes on in any game—seeing as how James Beard is a sort of competitor on the national chef awards and has yet to give her the win, Michelin would beat them to the deserved award.

Who Else Should Make the List?

Others are interesting names that could pop up in stars or Bib Gourmands—Kingfisher in Golden Hill (the pan-Asian star with a Vietnamese core), Lucien in La Jolla (an incredibly talented chef with some brilliant bits on the menu, though we had an uneven experience), 24 Suns in Oceanside (a nod for them would prove that Michelin truly cares only about the food, since the strip mall location is what a couple talented young chefs could afford), Tanner’s Prime Burgers in Oceanside (a hell of an incredible burger, and with a chef from three-star Benu in San Francisco, it’s the kind of burger joint that would make sense in the Michelin gentry), Atelier Manna (founding Jeune et Jolie chef Andrew Bachelier and his crew are cooking some of the best daytime food—I’m sure the word “brunch” would kill his soul—in the city).

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