The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Michelin faces questions over Dubai stars and government ties

The Michelin Guide’s Dubai awards have sparked controversy over stars given to closed restaurants and questions about the guide’s ties with the government.

I remember going to the Michelin award ceremony in Dubai last year. It was a staggeringly glamorous event with women dressed in their finest and men in black tie. Everyone who mattered in the hospitality industry in the region was in attendance and many great chefs had flown in for the occasion, including Jason Atherton, the former Gordon Ramsay protege, whose restaurants have now overtaken Ramsay’s in prestige as well as Bjorn Frantzen, who had two restaurants with three Michelin stars (the highest honour) in two different continents.

Michelin’s Dubai awards once made headlines with historic three-star wins for FZN and Tresind Studio. (Unsplash)

Michelin now rates restaurants in so many countries that it is impossible for Gwendal Poulennec, who runs the Michelin guide worldwide, to be present at every ceremony. But if the market is considered significant, the stars are awarded by a senior colleague of Gwendal’s. At the Dubai event two years before this one, my friend Elisabeth Boucher-Anselin had flown down from Paris to present the awards and Elisabeth’s charisma lent a frisson of excitement to the event.

But last year, Gwendal himself had turned up and once word got out that he was in town everyone expected that something dramatic would happen at the event.

But the excitement built up as Gwendal took the stage. To everyone’s surprise, he announced that Bjorn Frantzen’s FZN at Atlantis, which had been open for only a few months, had gone directly to three stars. Bjorn, who is normally super-cool (he looks like the Swedish James Bond), looked visibly shocked when he went up on stage. Afterwards he told me that he had no idea that Michelin would break with precedent and give FZN three stars.

This was not true of the other big surprise of the evening. Though I had signed an NDA and was sworn to secrecy (I didn’t even tell my son who was also at the ceremony), Gwendal had taken me along two days before the event when he visited TresInd Studio. The team assembled in the dining room and he told them that Tresind Studio had won three stars. This made it the first Indian restaurant in the world to ever make it to this league.

Gwendal and I went out for lunch after our visit to Tresind Studio (to Ritu Dalmia’s Atrangi; Michelin chose the restaurant) and I asked how he could be so trusting. Surely the news would leak?

I was wrong and he was right. At the ceremony, there were looks of surprise from the chefs in the audience when Tresind Studio was not named among the winners of two stars and gasps of awe and astonishment when Gwendal made the three stars announcement. The news had not leaked.

One fringe benefit for me was that I was able to write my story before the announcement was made (at a time that was relatively late in the night in India) and we were able to front-page the news in the next morning’s edition of the Hindustan Times.

This year the Michelin ceremony was held at the Royal Atlantis hotel (as it had been in the year when Elisabeth announced the stars), which added a certain amount of glamour. But when Gwendal told me he would not be attending because there were too many new projects elsewhere for him to focus on, I decided to give it a miss.

In fact, this year’s stars have ended up generating more controversy (in Dubai at least) than ever before.

What happened was this. Michelin inspectors visit restaurants anonymously around the year before deciding on the stars. This year’s awards were due to be held in May, but because of the turmoil in the Middle East, Michelin decided to postpone the ceremony till things quietened down. It was finally held in October.

It is no secret that during this crisis Dubai’s hospitality sector has suffered with many restaurants choosing to shut down till things improve. So what was Michelin to do with the list it had worked on all year and which had been ready for months?

It had two options. One was to go with the original list on the grounds that it was recognising the performance of restaurants over the last year. The other was to check which restaurants were currently closed and remove them from the list.

The choice was complicated by the fact that many of the restaurants that were closed did not regard the closures as being forever. For instance, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal is shut at the moment but neither Heston nor Atlantis are willing to say that it will never reopen. Ossiano, also at Atlantis, is actually scheduled to reopen in a month or so.

So what was Michelin to do? Guess which ones would actually reopen? Or to take the restaurants’ word and stick with the original list and reward restaurants for their performance over the year?

Michelin chose the first option which is what I would have done in its place. But within Dubai’s foodie circles many (most, even) people take the line that if a restaurant is currently shut then it should lose its stars.

It’s a valid and not unreasonable position. But it has been accompanied by a conspiracy theory mindset. One version is that Michelin was forced to include restaurants that were shut because of pressure from the Dubai government’s DET, which pays for the awards. Another theory is that Michelin was pressured by Atlantis to include closed restaurants because Atlantis could then keep Dinner and Ossiano’s stars.

The controversy has now reached the Western press, where the Michelin-government connection has been raised. The Sunday Times in London wrote, “Unwilling to voice dissent against the government-aligned tourist board that funds the guide in a country with strict freedom of speech laws, not to mention a tight-knit restaurant industry, many people have been left harbouring their resentments privately.”

It’s just one of the many problems that Michelin faces when it takes money from governments. But while I agree that Michelin’s critics have a perfect right to this point of view, I have enough faith in the guide to believe that it keeps governmental interference at an arm’s length. Yes, you can disagree with its decisions (as I frequently do), but the conspiracy theories seem a little overwrought to me.

Let’s wait for next year. Hopefully things will continue to return to normal in Dubai, a process that has already gathered steam, and Michelin will be better placed to judge what has closed forever. And Gwendal will turn up himself to end all the conspiracy theory nonsense.