Let’s get this out of the way — our restaurants are ready for The Michelin Guide.
Yes, The Michelin Guide has its issues. The distinct stench of white Eurocentrism hangs over it, with the only three-star restaurants being of the austere white tablecloth variety. Delicate, achingly pretty food decorated with tweezers and neo neo nordic restaurants inspired by the likes of René Redzepi abound. At the same time, the rest of the world hurtles onwards toward a more casual and colorful culinary future led by people of color and indigenous folks unafraid of facing the complex and often difficult realities (see: classism and colonialism) that make their food what it is.
The Guide likes to throw in a couple of token stars to more accessible restaurants like Tim Ho Wan in Hong Kong and, more infamously, Raan Jay Fai in Bangkok, Thailand. But these feel almost like a red herring, an attempt to convince diners that The Guide does, in fact, consider all sorts of food deserving of high praise (note, not the highest); that holes-in-the-wall and casual wine bars deserve to not merely be relegated to the realm of The Michelin Guide citations and Bib Gourmands.
There is the baggage, too. What was once a ruse to get diners to drive around Europe and look for places to eat is now considered one of the foremost measures of good eating all over the world. The Michelin Guide and its anonymous inspectors are well aware that what they publish is essentially a travel guide, but they carry themselves with a thick air of authority, bestowed upon them by over a century of notoriety. They may not be in the business of challenging the dining status quo and exploring in depth what makes good food what it is, but does that make any difference when they make picking somewhere to eat so much easier for everyone?
However, to young restaurant cities like Manila and Cebu, does any of this matter? We can spend hours hemming and hawing and gnashing our teeth online over whether or not our oft-misunderstood cuisine deserves or even needs the approval of some nebulous, aging institution. Still, the truth of the matter is The Michelin Guide brings in global diners.
We, as diners, have a complex relationship with popular restaurants. We are of the impatient sort. We are rarely able to suffer a long line because we have to deal with incompetence, corruption, and bureaucracy in every aspect of our everyday lives.
No other restaurant list has quite the same cultural cache that The Michelin does. An average person unburdened from the pedantry of foodie-ism will at least know what a Michelin star is from the get-go. The internet is lush with dime-a-dozen vloggers hunting down The Michelin-cited restaurants on their travels. The list even makes for easy fodder for lyricists looking to turn a phrase about food.
As hard as the lists of Tatler and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants try, they can’t quite break the mainstream the way that The Michelin has.
Global Recognition
When anyone is vaguely interested in trying something new to eat in another country, chances are one of the first things they’ll search for is The Guide. The Michelin Guide is a brand and a tourism juggernaut, plain and simple. Nearly anyone running a food business would kill for that kind of brand recognition.
In a region dominated by the likes of culinary titans like Bangkok and Singapore, a guide dedicated to Manila and Cebu, flawed or not, will give an undeniable boost to our growing dining scene. It might be the shot of adrenaline our restaurants need to help them further develop and explore what is possible in Philippine dining. At the very least, it will shine a spotlight on smaller, regional culinary artisans just outside of Manila.
The real issue, I fear, is whether or not our restaurants and the guide are ready for us, The Filipino Diner.
We, as diners, have a complex relationship with popular restaurants. We are of the impatient sort. We are rarely able to suffer a long line because we have to deal with incompetence, corruption, and bureaucracy in every aspect of our everyday lives.
When we allow ourselves a brief moment to indulge in something like eating out at the fancy new spot everyone’s been talking about, it must, must, must be worth what little time we had set aside for it.
The meal needs to meet some platonic ideal in our mind — a pitch perfect confection, spilling forth with umami and flavor, because it’s the least we believe we deserve for having made it through living in this god-forsaken country.
And when a restaurant isn’t able to meet the mark, we make sure to let everyone know.
Therein is the rub.
A Plethora of Opinions
The democratization of food criticism online has led to The Philippine dining scene developing a restaurant discourse problem (the irony is not lost on me, reader) before we’ve even developed a proper food criticism scene to begin with.
Everyone and their tito have published their take about how that one fancy über modern restaurant with the prix fixe menu and the free bread service was “okay lang,” while the last bastions of Filipino food writing are now long gone.
Where we once had a plethora of local food magazines on our shelves is now a veritable void. When pushed to cite any local food writers worth their salt, one would likely think of Doreen Fernandez whose essays continue to inform writing about Filipino food on the global level — and maybe one or two other names.
And even when our food publishing scene was at its most robust, there were no true food critics. Most restaurant features were and are essentially glorified press releases. If anyone wanted to read interesting and compelling work in food criticism, they would have to turn abroad to the likes of Jonathan Gold and Ruth Reichl. Even now, you would be hard-pressed to find a written critique of any local restaurant with the same level of craft and care that something like, say, an essay for Eater or Grub Street would entail.
And now enter The Michelin Guide, the notorious dining travel guide of yore, with plans to make its grand entrance before an unfledged crowd rife with mema (“may masabi lang”) culture, the thinnest of skin, and Facebook comments so venomous they could melt steel.
When The Guide drops, there will be opinions and there will be many of them. It will likely be a bloodbath.
We will share our personal alternatives to the picks. We will post the reasons why all these high-minded restaurants aren’t worthy of any of this attention. We will retweet and repost and comment and argue about menus and accessibility and overrated food until our knuckles begin to bleed.
All this is well and good, but without the specific nuance and openness that comes with a more experienced food scene, with critics and writers at the fore exposing us to different foodways and the inner workings of restaurants and the secret complexities of eating out, we are at risk of not meeting restaurants where they’re at.
In just the past year, we’ve read about a controversial new age pansit from a restaurant that in no way hid the fact that they reinterpret Filipino food, as well as someone in showbiz unleashing hell on a fine dining restaurant for having the trappings of a fine dining restaurant.
Even when our food publishing scene was at its most robust, there were no true food critics. Most restaurant features were and are essentially glorified press releases.
And Filipinos, the epitome of balat sibuyas, are prone to feeding the flames and creating one PR crisis after another, with aggravated chefs and irate diners sparring in the comments section over mediocre service and lukewarm food ad infinitum.
What more when The Michelin Guide’s stars finally begin to crash into our cities, and the buzzy restaurants begin to get even buzzier?
Do our restaurateurs have it in them to face the deluge of social media posts about how exaggerated the hype was, regardless of how difficult it is to keep a restaurant afloat at the best of times? Should we let our street food vendors and small-business-owners trying their best to keep their craft alive know that maybe they should brace themselves for words like “overrated” and “just okay”?
Are our chefs and cooks prepared for when the discourse about “deserving a star” reaches critical mass, and the backlash comes for them and not The Guide that started it all?
Food, of course, is personal, but everything else doesn’t have to be.
