San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Do Michelin stars really matter now?
Bay Area’s moribund toptier scene wrestles with what recognition means
Around this time last year, San Francisco chef Val Cantu was basking in the afterglow of Californios receiving two stars in the 2019 Michelin Guide to California’s best fine dining restaurants. These days, the feeling is a fuzzy memory for Cantu, who, like countless Bay Area restaurant owners, is wrestling with the possibility that his business will be forced to close before the end of the year.
Yet the California Michelin Guide is still planning to award stars to restaurants in 2020, based on prepandemic dining, and there’s a good chance Californios will again be among the recipients. For the first time in his career, Cantu said, he’s struggling to see the immediate value of one of the industry’s highest honors.
“We’re all having to face some decisions we don’t want to face right now,” Cantu said. “We worked our whole lives to get our own restaurants and now we’re looking at financial ruin. It’s hard to put a meaning on Michelin stars right now, or awards in general.”
Over the last decade, San Francisco has become known as the country’s premier fine dining city in part due to accolades from guides like Michelin, which in turn drove more new luxe restaurants to the region. But between dramatic loss in clientele and a nationwide reckoning over inequality, many of the Bay Area’s most esteemed chefs are grappling with what it means to be recognized right now.
Awards mean little when these restaurants may not survive, restaurateurs say, and since the most wellknown awards historically favor pricey, Eurocentric restaurants where nonwhite staffers have a harder time finding success, questions are now arising on how the entire system needs to be reshaped.
“The anxiety, the stress with thinking about (awards), none of that matters with all that everyone is going through right now,” said Evan Rich, coowner of San Francisco’s Michelinstarred Rich Table restaurant.
The local upscale dining scene was frenetic between 2014 and 2016; the market was flooded so quickly with similarly expensive new ventures that it became hard for some to survive. In 2016, multiple ambitious highend restaurants in the city that opened to glowing reviews lasted only months before closing, leading some to speculate the country was on the cusp of a restaurant industry collapse, starting in San Francisco.
But the bubble burst never came, in part due to years of growth fueled by the Bay Area’s influx of new tech money. With it came a demographic of wealthy young food lovers interested in exclusive dining experiences. Local chefs responded with concepts
that fit their tastes.
Perhaps the epitome of the scene came in 2016, when San Francisco restaurant Quince made headlines for serving truffle croquettes atop an iPad playing a video of truffleseeking dogs. Tech luminaries served as investors: Saison in SoMa, for instance, opened in 2013 with funding from Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton and angel investor Tim Ferris, according to a Bloomberg report at the time. By 2017 the Bay Area had more threeMichelinstarred restaurants than any other place in the country, a reflection of the boom in highend establishments that the Michelin star system favors.
Awards like Michelin stars, published annually by the French tire company as a travel guide, served as an indicator of which restaurants were resonating with the wealthier dining public. They could drive up sales by as much as 25% or help fuel expansion. Saison’s longtime threeMichelinstar status, for instance, helped turn its chef, Joshua Skenes, into a local celebrity. He then also opened upscale seafood restaurant Angler in San Francisco.
The awards also could bring prestige on a global scale. For example, in 2017 when Coi in San Francisco earned three Michelin stars while boasting a $250 seafoodfocused tasting menu under chef Matthew Kirkley, the Michelin Guide international director Michael Ellis said Kirkley was “doing things (the Michelin Guide had) never seen anywhere in the world.”
The pandemic represents the first time in a decade that the fine dining sector has come to a full stop. Most of the fine dining restaurants aren’t suited for takeout or delivery and have turned into more casual enterprises. Others struggle to translate fine dining experiences to the outdoors.
“We don’t know the path forward in all of this because none of it is familiar to any of us,” said Laurie Thomas, a local restaurateur and the president of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. “This is an ongoing education thing . ... We’re in a situation where we’re wondering what’s next. My husband is like, ‘All we need now is an earthquake.’ ”
Coronavirus has also essentially negated the financial benefit of Michelin stars for restaurants in San Francisco, where the falloff in visitors is expected to cost the city nearly $11 billion in tourism spending in 2020 and 2021.
Aaron London operates Al’s Place, a San Francisco restaurant that has maintained one Michelin star for the past five years. Since the pandemic, London has made his vegetablefocused menus cheaper, going from familystyle meals at around $70 per person to curbside familystyle dinners for less than $50. He also added a grocery store.
“With a massive recession and food insecurity and just so many things going on, I don’t even think a Michelin star is going to carry a positive connotation, from a diner perspective,” he said.
Many chefs who say they don’t care about the awards this year say it’s because they aren’t able to cook the food they were doing before the pandemic, with many turning instead to takehome meal kits.
San Francisco’s Rich Table has always taken a playful approach to its everchanging roughly $90 chef ’s menus, offering dishes like a pork chop schnitzel one night and ramen noodles tossed in hoisin sauce another. Now it is doing $49 dinner packages, and owners Sarah and Evan Rich are no longer as concerned with making everything “perfect,” Evan said.
“I won’t say our food has regressed, but I’ll say we’re just cooking now to soothe the soul,” he added.
The stress of mounting debt and providing employees with steady paychecks and health care overrides any joy that Pim Techamuanvivit might usually get out of an award, said the chef whose Thai destination Kin Khao has received a Michelin star for the last four years. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for Michelin to cancel its publication altogether, she said, suggesting that it could do more damage than good during this challenging time.
“Imagine you had one star and then that star was taken away, right now of all times,” she said. “I would lock myself away in the bathroom for
a year if that happened to me. I wouldn’t be able to take it.”
But the issues chefs and business owners are wrestling with aren’t limited to the financial losses due to closed dining rooms. This year has also seen monumental social justice movements. And the fine dining industry — a sector where workers stand to earn more money than most other places in the restaurant world — has notoriously reflected inequities present elsewhere in the world. Many restaurant workers have publicly spoken out about discrimination they’ve faced, including at some of the Bay Area’s most esteemed Michelinstarred restaurants. According to a 2019 report by worker advocacy nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Center United, the Bay Area has the widest wage gap between white workers and workers of color at upscale restaurants in the country.
Since awards play a critical role in fueling which highend restaurants succeed, there are growing calls for people who’ve long benefited from the structure to make changes. The influential James Beard Foundation, which has honored many local restaurants and has also been criticized for inequities, announced recently that it would discontinue its awards until 2022, with the hope of implementing ways to address the problems. A New York Times story later revealed that the cancellation was due in part because there were no Black winners.
Pressure is also on the chefs, many of whom are trying to publicly align themselves with messages of change.
Before March, the idea of a restaurant removing itself from consideration for such awards was unheard of. But around the same time of the Beard Foundation’s announcement, David Kinch of Manresa, a finalist for its top honor of Outstanding Chef and winner of previous Beard awards, dropped out, citing “rampant gender and racial inequality” in the business. Others across the country did so as well, sometimes because of accusations of unequal workplaces.
The core of how San Francisco’s onceflourishing fine dining scene functions, many now say, needs to transform, and the pandemic’s decimation of the industry could be an opportunity to start anew.
For some in the industry, though, the proclamations so far ring hollow, lacking detailed strategies. Numerous chefs have used social media to voice their concerns, including Oakland chef Preeti Mistry, a prominent voice regarding equity in the restaurant world, who took to Twitter to voice frustration at the reaction to Kinch’s stance.
“White supremacy is literally the entire industry falling at David Kinch’s feet calling him a hero for saying the SAME thing QBIPOC folks in the industry have been saying FOR YEARS,” Mistry wrote on Aug. 20, followed by a second tweet saying, “And we were called traitors, to be clear.”
Southern pastry chef and author Lisa Donovan, who won a James Beard Award in 2018 for a personal essay titled “Dear Women: Own Your
Stories,” shared similar sentiments online, and her post highlighted the media’s reception of Kinch’s proclamation.
“This is the part where I’d like to RESAY that I think it’s bullshit that I have spent the last five or six years having a conversation about and the last three years WRITING A BOOK ABOUT nearly the EXACT manifesto David Kinch took an hour to create a set of Instagram slides for,” she wrote.
There have been few public efforts by fine dining chefs in the Bay Area to increase equity in their restaurants. One of the more headlinegrabbing pursuits came from San Francisco chef Daniel Patterson, widely considered one of the decade’s most influential California chefs; his partnerships with chefs of color were controversial, with one chef suing Patterson over breach of contract.
Still, whether the future fine dining landscape will be more diverse and inclusive relies on the industry’s overall health, said Thomas of the Golden Gate Restaurant Assocation: “If restaurants don’t survive what’s happening now, there won’t be places left to even address those issues.”
Despite the drastic changes and a debate over the value of awards, many in the fine dining industry don’t see this as the end for highend offerings in San Francisco. One Market restaurant in San Francisco, an elder statesman in the city’s power lunch and upscale dinner scene, is continuing to cater to diners interested in multicourse service, even if it’s through delivery apps. One Market has a prime rib dinner, which comes with multiple sides and a butterscotch pudding, for $45. Ordering this dinner for two people, and including service charges and a tip, just tops $100.
“We learned a long time ago, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” said Michael Dellar, founder and managing partner of One Market. “We’ve had a following for 27 years . ... We don’t plan to completely change what has made us popular in that time.”
Regulars of Michelinstarred Birdsong restaurant, where meals once cost more than $150 per person, are the ones who are supporting its new, more casual fried chicken venture, Birdbox, according to chef Chris Bleidorn. Fans from out of town have also been donating to the restaurant, he added.
Diners “sacrifice a lot of money to live in the Bay Area, and with that they know part of the reason of that cost and why they justify it ... the city offers amazing dining,” Bleidorn said.
Fine dining might even get more expensive as a result of the pandemic, said Rupert Blease, a coowner of San Francisco’s Lord Stanley, which has a Michelin star. His restaurant was one of the city’s more affordable Michelinstarred restaurants before the pandemic; it wasn’t uncommon for the restaurant to offer threecourse dinners for $45 per person.
Blease said he wouldn’t be surprised to see restaurants allow diners to eat alone in rooms to themselves if it helps wealthy customers feel comfortable.
“The super highend will live on out here, but it’s just going to be more exclusive, more expensive,” he said. “The clientele is going to be more elite, and it will be the people willing to pay that high amount because that’s the only way that service could be seen as warranted.”
Awards, too, will play a role once again, many chefs said; there are still longterm benefits to getting a Michelin star. At a time when restaurants are closing, some said, a star could help an employee find a new job once the industry returns to normal. And since the Michelin guide is already on its way to being published, it should be released to the public even if the dining world has changed, many chefs added.
Many chefs and restaurateurs said the main objective in the fine dining world today is simply trying to stay in business in any form at all.
“I don’t think anyone is trying to think about a review, or what people are saying online, or where they’re going to be placed on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list,” said chef Techamuanvivit, referring to another influential restaurant awards list. “We’re just trying to survive, and that’s hard enough.”