Memechelin Ideas
Background
(Scroll past entirety of green line for meat of article)
Background/context info typically test the patience of readers a lot. I am one of the impatient. It is okay to skip this part.The Michelin Guides have been in existence for over a century, but its command of popular opinion only came about post-2000s.
Since its first publication in 1900, the Guides have always been popular. But that’s the point— it was only popular relative to its audience reach. In the early 1900s, it was restricted to the few people who owned cars. Over a couple decades, the niche expanded from pretentious motorists to pretentious people who actually buy guidebooks. Then, fast forward 80 years, with the advent of internet and globalization, everyone gets to be pretentious.
Well, “pretentious” implies a lack of substance, which is inaccurate in many cases. Let’s replace that with “transcendent.”
Indeed, for a distinction to be recognized, a restaurant would need to have a distinction first. The distinction which Michelin critics favor, is “transcendence”— the restaurant must have some form of quality that transcend itself from just being a restaurant, from a building that houses tables, waiters, chefs, and food.
How would one measure transcendence? Basically, the degree of transcendence = the ease at which a restaurant can turn itself into a Netflix documentary.
For a Michelin review, the basic filter of “transcendence” is price.
If a restaurant is super duper ultra expensive: The price is unreasonable, so the reason for this unreasonableness must be a great reason. Why are visitors willing to pay such exorbitant prices? The justification provided by the restaurant must be amazing.
If a restaurant is super duper cheap, like so cheap that it’s the price of 1/9 a Chipotle bowl: “Wow! So cheap! There is no way the owner can make a proper living off of this unless they sell like a million orders per year! Wow! They do sell a million orders per year! Look at the lines!” This type of restaurant is typically marked by a ridiculously long line leading to an unassuming physical entity, like a food cart. The restaurant transcends economics.
Therefore, the pursuit of a transcendent factor has made Michelin restaurants widely associated with their price. The distinctions of price and storied qualities set the Guide apart from the hundreds of other rankings. While “Michelin Star” became synonymous with either “good restaurant” or “bad, expensive restaurant” to different people, Zagat became irrelevant to all people.
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.(I really hope you googled “Zagat” just now and thereby validated its irrelevance. That would be slightly cool.)
The purpose of this article is to imagine several ridiculous (yet probable) ways to make a Michelin-destined restaurant.
First, as this potential restaurant is a Michelin-wannabe, we must examine a failed Michelin-wannabe for cautions.
Ardent Restaurant - Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Of course, Ardent is a great restaurant. But it was evident that an attempt to become the first Michelin restaurant in Milwaukee was made. At this, they have failed so far.
(This applies to other wannabes in general)
Food: Good! The food tastes good. In addition to the good taste, it’s got the standard fine-dining artistic-for-the-sake-of-artistic presentations. What are the standard fine-dining totally-artistic platings?
Colorful, exotic sauce dotted on big white plates. (The sauces are usually black or orange or red, they really are just variants of spicy mayo in most cases).
Weird plates. A stable in this kind of establishments. Big plates; giant, table-sized plates; tiny plates; plates with a hole in the center; plates possibly inspired by graphics from topology papers; plates made of cement; plates shaped like cones but is actually a bowl-laddle hybrid with a hidden compartment for potato casserole.
Tiny patties of food that normally aren’t combined together, like “agedashi tofu infused with (insert French region) truffle elixir, topped with saffron/rosemary (woo they put something red/purple where the green onion usually is?! How exciting), all of this on top of a saba stump; for the saba, some menu will read ‘saba (Japanese mackerel)’; others could go a step further and read ‘saba (Yaizu coast, provided by Mr. Kato Tamachi, age 52, fisherman of 25 years, Masters Degree in Marine Biology)’.” The separate ingredients of this dish normally have no business being together, but the consumer is expected to have the “wow! this is so exciting, refreshing, and surprisingly delicious” revelation.
The Story. Usually, this story could be about a dish or the chef themselves, told either by the waiter or through a piece of easy, tasteful reading provided on the table. Yes— not only must we sate our hunger through physical food, we must satisfy our spiritual hunger as well! Ardent did not tell any stories.
The locally-sourced. Ingredients are usually claimed to be either locally-sourced from a plethora of small farmers, or airlifted from a frighteningly far place. In Ardent’s case, not only were the vegetables locally (and ethically) -produced, the waiter actually came to our table with a case of knives, prior to a steak dish. He proceeded to tell us about the local forest in which the wood that made the wooden knife case was harvested, the name of the lumberjack company, the name of the carpenter/artisan who crafted the knife case as well as the knife handles, the name of another artisan who cast the steel knives themselves, and finally let us pick a knife from the case. To this I asked internally: “Why?”
A subtle wine list (sometimes tea list) whose names the waiter must have spent hours perfecting the pronunciation thereof. We do not need to explore this further.
Looking at Ardent, and countless hundreds other fine-dining establishments across the world, there is definitely a standard to which they all adhere to, and each try to conjure a spin to these norms that would hopefully be received as “refreshing” or even “brilliant”.
Okay, to be honest, the above part wasn’t really worth reading either.
You see, for a restaurant to truly transcend, it must transcend the Michelin Guide itself as well. It must not operate solely for the purpose of becoming a Michelin Star restaurant. It must have a principle — the most basic, fundamental principle of all — a restaurant exists to serve food to customers. How and why this food is served is up to the chef. It could be filling the stomach, or it could be filling the soul. The restaurant must craft an experience that is so evocative of our most precious memories, yet so provocative to challenge our notion of what is possible.
Of course, our restaurant is existing only for the express purpose of obtaining a Michelin Star, so the above paragraph is what we must say.
Now, the actual fake ideas.
The description of these ideas are told to the customer (hereafter “User”) to avoid seeming overtly pretentious, but also unmistakably pretentious.
Cheese
One day, when enjoying a cheeseboard made up mostly of Gruyère while watching videos, I notice the cheese tasted better than usual. I was wearing a pair of Sennheiser headphones. The warm cushions of the earmuffs preserved the heat on my head, which also made my chewing much more audible and granular than normal. The heat of my head enabled the aroma of the cheese to flow upward unimpeded, thereby enabling more than one sensory organ to enjoy the cheese’s flavor.
User will eat Gruyère while wearing headphones with thick, warm, and soft earmuffs. The headphone will not have cables, as to give the User a audible sense of their jaw movement.
Cold Room
Cold, sweet things are actually best enjoyed when the body heat is low. During summer, consuming ice cream accompanies a slight loss of flavor as our tongue is stung by the sudden intrusion of wildly lower temperature.
Hachiya persimmon is the soft and gooey variant, with fillings that are delightfully chewy. It is best enjoyed cold, as the gooey sensation would not be disturbing but enveloping, while the chewy fillings give a melting sensation.
Fuyu persimmon is the hard and crunchy variant, its texture is much more akin to a cucumber. At higher temperature, the sweetness caramelizes and is less intrusive, and could therefore be enjoyed more fully.
User will sample a warm slice of fuyu persimmon on a thin sheet of orange-glaze. (The orange glaze’s slight sour taste would pair with the almost entirely sweet persimmon).
User will then be directed to walk to a cold room, be convinced to wait patiently for two minutes, then consume a cup of chilled hachiya persimmon fillings within the room, with a chilled spoon.
Breathe Air
User will be directed, once again, to walk. This time to a sizable patch of grass in the back yard with lilac flowers (due to the seasonal nature of lilacs, this, uh, “experience” would only be available for 2-6 weeks during May and early June). The lilac flowers would be numbering about 10 canes, enough to give off a subtle scent that could be carried by slight breeze, but not too strong to be overpowering the grass.
In the yard, User will be served a small, round-shaped sandwich. The bread are circular cutouts of the inner most part of a golden-toasted sliced-bread, while the filling is egg white, fried along with rest of the egg and cut out by the same mold.
User will chew the sandwich normally, the natural scent of the plants would invariably seep in and mix with the simple breakfast sandwich during and after consumption.
“The Micro-organic Environment”
The “freshness” of, say, a fish, is not actually determine by its “aliveness.” In other words, a live fish isn’t necessarily fresh, while a deceased fish isn’t necessarily not fresh. The freshness of a fish is actually determined by its body conditions immediately prior to the cooking process. For example, the Japanese fish-cutting method of Ikejime avoids giving any pain or internal blood-letting to the fish. This prevents the blood from entering the fish meat, while also psychologically soothes the fish to prevent chemical communications of stress. When transporting a fish, it is important to preserve the “micro-organic environment” of a fish (basically a ocean/river-water tank with regulated temperatures and underwater current simulations, complete with algae and planktons), meaning the fish would be consuming the normal amount of planktons and bacteria etc, even during transit. Within this environment, the fish could also be fed dish-specific ingredients.
Does this make sense scientifically? Who knows. It makes for good proprietary concept.
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At the end of the course, an envelope will be placed in front of the User, containing, in cash, the amount of money they paid for this meal. A possibly commentary on the inferiority of money as a value-measuring tool for the restaurant experience. After all, a restaurant with the singular purpose of Michelin Stardom does not need to profit.