Communication key, says restaurateur, and Michelin judges get the message
The ability to convey the message of a dish to customers and to consistently maintain the quality of food are part of the recipe that Bernard Yeoh’s restaurant has followed in order to earn a Michelin star for the past 12 years.
Yeoh, the founder of Chinese restaurant Kai Mayfair, said: “It is the restaurant’s job to ensure that what they are trying to do is effectively communicated to the customers so that every single person who walks in understands what the dishes are about. Then, it is about giving every single dish the consistency Michelin requires.”
Yeoh adds: “That is just hard work, which means doing the same thing again and again. Even though it’s the hundredth time you made it this week, you still have to give the same amount of effort.”
In the newly released Michelin
Guide Great Britain and Ireland 2020, 187 restaurants have been awarded the accolade of Michelin status, of which four are Chinese restaurants, all with one Michelin star. For the previous year, there were five.
Aside from Kai Mayfair, the other Chinese restaurants to have made the cut are Hakkasan Hanway Place, Hakkasan Mayfair, and A Wong. Yauatcha Soho did not retain its Michelin status from last year.
Rebecca Burr, director of the Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland, said that for restaurants to gain or retain a Michelin star, it is all about the quality and consistency of the food served to customers — regardless of the type of cuisine being offered.
“Our inspectors spend a lot of time overseas and sharing knowledge with inspection teams around the world, so that we can be confident that standards are consistent between different countries and different cuisines,” Burr added.
Yeoh doesn’t believe that Chinese restaurants in the UK are disadvantaged in any way when it comes to the Michelin guide reviewing process.
“If you are serving a cuisine which is not the cuisine natively known by someone, then the job of the restaurant is to communicate and if you do that, then you are exactly on an equal footing with everybody else,” he said.
Restaurants usually do not know the Michelin reviewing criteria and the inspectors who visit the premises are always anonymous.
“It’s almost a matter of coincidence that what we are doing aligns with what Michelin wants,” Yeoh said.
“It’s always been in our thinking that if you want to convince people of what we are about, then we have to try and create food which people love but might hate, rather than designing a menu entirely on what people might like.”
Yeoh set up Kai Mayfair in 1993, but it was not until 2008 that his restaurant gained a Michelin star for the first time. He attributed the breakthrough to his bold move of narrowing down the menu and highlighting the focus.
“The hardest thing we found was actually to decide what not to put on the menu,” he said, because there was a time when his restaurant menu was crowded, with both old favorites and new dishes created by a new chef.
“So, one day, we decided to cut the menu in half, and we had lots of complaints from customers. It was difficult,” Yeoh said. “But we did what we believed in, and we believe that we have to have focus and let customers know what we are about. And in the following years, we got the star. It’s risky, but you have to commit.”