French chef wants to leave Michelin guide after being stripped of a star
French chef Marc Veyrat had, for years, been at the top of his sport but in January the venerable foodies’ bible stripped him of one of his stars.
He’s now demanding his La Maison des Bois restaurant in Manigod, in southeastern France, be withdrawn from the guide and accuses the 119-year-old institution of “amateurism”.
‘You are manipulators’
“I have been depressed for six months. How dare you take the health of your cooks hostage?,” he said in a statement to Le Point newspaper this week.
‘We are homogeneous in our classification’
In an interview with Euronews, Gwendal Poullenec, the international director of the Michelin guide, explained that a star is attributed on five criteria: the quality of the products; the mastery of the cooking process; the harmony of flavours; the personality of the chef as expressed on the plate; and regularity or a team’s ability to offer a constant level of quality throughout the menu and time.
Then the analysis and the requirements are upped for each additional star with the guide describing the difference as one-starred restaurant deserving a client stops when passing by, two-starred restaurants deserving one takes a detour to visit them, and three-starred ones seen as destinations in themselves.