FRENCH DISS
Michelin proves it’s cuckoo — and irrelevant — by not giving any stars to the great Le Coucou
MORT à Michelin. Vive Le Coucou!
In its most infuriating, rubber-spewing blowout yet, for the second year in a row, the tire company’s New York City Michelin Guide gave no stars to Le Coucou — Stephen Starr and Daniel Rose’s great downtown French eatery.
Rose declined to comment, while Starr tells The Post: “We’re sad about Le Coucou. We do think we deserve it. But there’s always next year.”
Le Coucou, at the 11 Howard hotel, was named the best new restaurant in America this year by the James Beard Foundation. It’s adored by every critic in town. It’s so popular that it’s booked up six months ahead despite entree prices up to $45.
All for good reason: By ever-so-gently inflecting it with an American sensibility, Chef Rose is making great, traditional French cooking taste better than it maybe ever did. On a dish-bydish basis, Le Coucou’s a la carte menu rivals anything at the city’s longer-established, prixfixe French places.
I’m not alone in being outraged by the diss to Le Coucou. New York Times food editor Sam Sifton tweeted it was “inexplicable.” Forbes called it “confounding.”
Le Coucou ought to be close to Michelin’s heart. Not only does Rose love and celebrate classic French cuisine, he serves it in an elegant, whitetablecloth setting that the tire boys prefer.
But Michelin doesn’t love Rose back. Its brain (or brain-dead) trust apparently hates that a young American from Chicago upended the Parisian restaurant scene — first with the impossibly popular Spring in 2006, and with two more places since. (Rose recently announced Spring was closing.)
None of Rose’s Paris restaurants have ever earned a Michelin star either, despite their enthusiastic embrace by ordinary local customers and French restaurant writers.
In an e-mail, a rep for Michelin tells The Post: “The notion that we would in any way hold hostility toward a chef, in any capacity, is unfounded and unsupported,” and the guide “doesn’t intentionally hold back star status from a chef or restaurant.”
Well, if there’s no institutional bias, they simply need to replace their imbecilic reviewers.
Except for properly honoring Le Bernardin and Eleven Madison Park with three stars each, Michelin’s New York list is full of WTFs. It also denied stars to the Grill, the marvelous new fine-dining temple inside the former Four Seasons, and chopped down wellhumming Jean-Georges from three stars to two, while awarding three each to past-their-prime Per Se and Masa.
Le Coucou doesn’t need Michelin, which is consulted mainly by clueless foreigners. But the slight will go down as France’s worst embarrassment since it lost the 2006 World Cup on a head butt, which the book’s mindless masters could use.