Michelin: Tokyo world's top gastronomy city

Tokyo has secured more three-star restaurant ratings

than Paris, with Michelin awarding the top rating to 11

restaurants in the Japanese capital, a summary of

Michelin's latest guide showed Tuesday. In the 2010

version of the Michelin guide for Tokyo, the Japanese

capital has also secured 42 two-star restaurant ratings

and 144 one- star ratings. Paris has 10 three-star

restaurants, according to Michelin.

Tokyo is much bigger than Paris, is there any rational

here? It is not a matter of size of a City it is a

matter of quality of the place and gastronomy.

Michelin Guide Director Jean-Luc Naret told a press

conference in Tokyo that the number of stars shows the

high quality of food in the Japanese capital.

The guides currently cover major cities in 23

countries, including Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles,

New York and San Francisco as well as Kyoto and Osaka.

A total of seven restaurants in Kyoto and Osaka

received three-star ratings in October.

International cuisine "Tokyo remains by far the world

capital of gastronomy and also has the most three-star

restaurants," said Michelin guide director Jean-Luc

Naret. Tokyo's sheer size helps explain why it has so

many Michelin stars.

Tokyo is much bigger than Paris and has 160,000

restaurants compared with about 40,000 in Paris.

Two-thirds of the Michelin-starred restaurants in Tokyo

serve Japanese cuisine, while the others serve a

variety of foods including French, Spanish, Chinese and

Italian. But the French need not feel their cuisine

has plunged completely into disrepute.

France still has more three-star restaurants than

anywhere else, with 25 compared with Japan's 18. The

next Michelin guide to Paris will be published in March

2010. The latest Michelin guide for Tokyo hit the

stands on Friday priced at 2,415 yen.

Picture (FCCJ Bibendum, Delmas, Naret, Moderator Jlk)

So of course the day before the release of the third

edition for Tokyo, I invited Michelin Guide books

president Jean-Luc Naret at our professional press

luncheon at The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

And he gave us as a secret : Michelin is to place local

food inspectors on the ground in each of the 23

countries it covers!

Here is the best news coverage I found on the data base.

“When we come to a new country, we must work with

people who understand how to rate restaurants,”

explained Naret, who used three Europeans and two

Japanese to evaluate Tokyo for 2008. “But it usually

takes five years to move to a staff of entirely local

people.”

This time, the team was comprised of only Japanese

inspectors and a French editor-in-chief. The group

selected 11 restaurants in Tokyo for its top three-star

rating, pushing it past Paris by one for the top spot,

an achievement that the company believes makes the

metropolis the world’s gastronomic champ.

In comparison to last year, the 2010 Tokyo edition,

available in English and Japanese from Friday for 2,415

yen, bumped the restaurants Esaki, Sushi Saito and

Yukimura up to three-star status, and dropped one,

Hamadaya, down a notch. Tokyo upped its total count to

261 stars, 34 more than last year, and three times that

of France’s capital. Naret maintains, however, that it

is difficult to easily compare the two cities given

that Tokyo has a much larger population and four times

as many restaurants. It comes down to numbers, he

said. “Tokyo as a city has more restaurants than

Italy, Germany or Spain,” the director said. “So

statistically there should be more stars here.”

The company, whose guide was first published in France

in 1900, explains that the star rankings apply only to

what appears on the customer’s plate and are dictated

by the food’s quality, flavor, value for the money and

consistency across the menu. Three stars represent

“exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey,” two

stars merit “a detour” and one constitutes a “very good

restaurant.”

About two-thirds of the selected restaurants in Tokyo

offer Japanese cuisine, such as soba (noodles),

sukiyaki (hot pot), fugu (blowfish), sushi and tempura,

while the remainder are mainly French and Italian. The

area of research was expanded for 2010 to include

izakaya outlets and shops specializing in yakitori

(grilled chicken), kushiage (deep-fried meat and

vegetables) and shojin ryori (vegetarian cooking).

At the start of the Tokyo project, Naret had ventured

to other Asian cities, such as Hong Kong, Bangkok and

Singapore. He found the selection of high-quality

restaurants in Japan’s capital to be overwhelming — an

attribute that was soon shared with the rest of world

following its award of 191 stars to 150 restaurants,

the most of any city. “Tokyo was put on the map as one

of the top gastronomic cities in the world,” he said of

the release of the first book. “And it was quite a

shock for people on the other side of the world because

they did not know what Tokyo was all about.” (TR)