Top Chef, Michelin, 50 Best, & James Beard: The Race for Restaurant Recognition!!

The Chef's Cut

Hosts Adrienne Cheatham and Joe Flam examine the shifting landscape of culinary prestige, specifically focusing on the perceived erosion of

Key takeaways

• The partnership between Michelin and Sysco raises concerns that plaque distribution could be used as a sales tool for distributors.
• Tourism boards often pay Michelin to enter new markets, which challenges the guide's status as an independent arbiter.

Main topics

• Michelin Guide integrity
• Culinary award commercialization

Notable quotes

If guests still care, guests still care. That's the actual arbiter.

Conclusion

Despite growing disillusionment with the commercialization of culinary

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:12) Today on The Chef's Cut, we are talking about the murky relationship between Cisco and the Michelin Guide. Give Speaker 2 (0:18) me three bags of charcoal and three stars, thank you. Speaker 1 (0:21) Whether or not winning Top Chef is more important than winning a James Beard Award. I Speaker 2 (0:26) don't think anyone listening to this or watching this will think I don't have a bias. Speaker 1 (0:31) And why diners might be the most important voices of all. Speaker 2 (0:35) If guests still care, guests still care. Speaker 1 (0:37) That's the actual arbiter. But first, Chef's Cut Nation, you know what time it is. We need 10 seconds of your day. Please rate and review the show wherever you get your pods. It really helps. Speaker 2 (0:54) Michelin star season is right around the corner. They're going to start dropping those plaques off door to door. And I think Michelin has been getting a lot of heat lately. I feel like in the last few years, they've been getting a ton. We're Speaker 1 (1:06) part of that. We're part of bringing that heat because I don't understand what they're doing. Now Speaker 2 (1:11) they got this two-year-old relationship with Cisco. So they're getting a ton of heat for that conflict of interest type stuff. You have the James Beard where Tom Colicchio, multi-James Beard award winner. beacon of the industry comes out and says winning Top Chef is as important as winning the James Beard Award, which you could not imagine someone saying when we went on the show, let alone when it began. And then you got the world's 50 best rebranding itself as the 50. Speaker 1 (1:38) Right. Speaker 2 (1:39) Like it's like a TRL music video list. Now it's like, oh, tune into the 50. See if Britney Spears is still on top. Speaker 1 (1:47) And that's the thing. These awards used to be, I mean, they were the be-all, end-all of our industry. You lived and died by getting one of these awards. Speaker 2 (1:56) And I feel like those crazy old people who are like, it's not what it used to be. You know, Speaker 1 (2:02) it Speaker 2 (2:02) used to be something. That's how I feel sometimes when we talk about this. But I think the conversation needs to be had. And I think we have to start with Michelin. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 1 (2:12) I Speaker 2 (2:12) think they're the biggest elephant in Speaker 1 (2:14) the Speaker 2 (2:14) room right now. Yeah. Because... The whole Cisco thing. Speaker 1 (2:18) It's wild. It's like when people say and speculate about awards being pay to play, this Cisco Michelin partnership does nothing to dispel the pay to play questions that people have. Because it started off with Cisco sponsoring the Texas ceremony in 2024. And Speaker 2 (2:39) the Texas ceremony, that's the one where they like invite all the chefs down and they announce. Right. Yeah. OK. Speaker 1 (2:45) And it's one thing to know that tourism boards pay Michelin to come in. We've known that for a while now. Michelin doesn't just arbitrarily say, I heard there was an amazing restaurant off in the northwest corner of Idaho. Let me get up there and check out what this chef is doing. No, the tourism board of Idaho has to pay for Michelin to come Speaker 2 (3:09) in. Speaker 1 (3:09) Does Idaho Speaker 2 (3:09) even have a northwest corner? Speaker 1 (3:11) Do they even have a tourism board? I don't know. Speaker 1 (3:16) But Michelin is not this independent arbiter of restaurants and good taste that we all thought that it was. And we've seen that over the years with being paid by tourism boards to enter a new market. And then you add to that the Cisco relationship and it gets a little murkier. Speaker 2 (3:33) I think it gets way murkier. But, you know, I think people are really upset about the Cisco thing, right? Because I think it creates at least the appearance that like. People who are working with them are going to have preferential treatment, which is like, how Speaker 1 (3:46) could you Speaker 2 (3:46) not feel that way? Whether it's in good faith or not, like that's the appearance when you have Cisco reps dropping off Michelin plaques. Thank Speaker 1 (3:54) you. It's Speaker 2 (3:54) impossible not to have any correlation between the two. Right. Yeah. And whether or not that's true, I don't think it matters. It's the appearance. And for me, it's like the Cisco thing is just another brick in the road of like Michelin going way. Way off course. And I think and it's not the most egregious to me, though. I Speaker 1 (4:15) think that they started to go off the rails when they started issuing plaques for Michelin recommended restaurants as opposed to just starred restaurants. And then that's when it seemed like it became a marketing ploy because you just want to see that red Michelin plaque. Michelin wants to have more of a presence in the U.S. And then you add the layer of Cisco being the distributor. for those plaques. And I can't find a publicly available copy of their contract with Michelin, but I did find that they are using it as a sales tool because Joe Flam, you own four restaurants in the great food city of Chicago, right? I do. If you're not buying from Cisco, but I'm a Cisco rep and I want to get your account, I want to make money off of all four of your restaurants buying at least soap and paper towels from me. If not. protein and vegetables. So I'm going to say, hey, Joe, I have your Michelin plaque. Can we set up a meeting for me to come by and drop it off? And meanwhile, I'm going to use that opportunity of having that FaceTime with you to pitch you on buying my products. Right. Speaker 2 (5:22) And like you have FaceTime with me in a very good mood then because you're bringing me something that I want. Right. Speaker 1 (5:27) Exactly. Speaker 2 (5:29) You know, for me, the plaques and it's like whatever accolade you get. If it works for you, if it makes your team happy, ride that wave. But it kind of like the weird, it's like now it's created these things where people are like, oh, it's a Michelin restaurant. And when you and I were coming up, if someone said, I worked in a Michelin restaurant, it's like you worked at a one star. Speaker 1 (5:49) Exactly. If Speaker 2 (5:50) you worked at a two star, you said you worked at a two star. You worked at a three. You let every damn person know you met that you worked at a three. You know what I mean? There was no, no mince words about it. You didn't say, oh, I work in a Michelin restaurant. You said, Speaker 1 (6:04) I work in a three Michelin star restaurant. Speaker 2 (6:06) Like there was no two ways about it. And so it's like, now it's kind of come to the same. It was like, oh, I work in a Michelin restaurant. And it's like, Rosemary has one of the red plaques. So it's like a guest by technicality. It's a Michelin restaurant. I don't think of it that way. If I think of like, I ran a Michelin restaurant. I ran one for five and a half years. We had one star at Spiaggia. I ran a Michelin restaurant. I don't think like, you know what I mean? Like, I love Rosemary. I love what we do. I'm proud of the food we put out every day. I'm proud of the service we provide every day. If we're not a one star, that's okay. That's not what we're going for. That's not what we do. But so the plaque thing is weird. It's just different to me. It's almost like when, you know, like when luxury car makers started making like way cheaper versions. So it's like, you could be like, oh, I bought a Mercedes. Speaker 1 (6:52) Uh-huh. Yeah. And Speaker 2 (6:53) it's like, well, what kind of Mercedes? You know what I mean? Because there's a difference between an S-class and like a little hatchback. You know what I mean? And there's nothing wrong with either. But those are different conversations. Speaker 1 (7:03) You know, and Speaker 2 (7:04) like that's what it kind of like reminds me of, of like this Michelin goofiness. But to me, it's the tourism board. It's way more just how they've expanded in the United States, I think, is way, way more egregious than any of the Cisco stuff. But the tourism boards, the way they've expanded in the U.S., I think, was just like, OK, we're going to throw out the whole history of this. Speaker 1 (7:24) Yeah. And it's, you know, it's we think of Michelin as this, you know, they care about the food. They care about the quality. They have this firewall. They're an independent reviewer. Right. That's how we were taught to think about Michelin. But Michelin is a business. The guide was subsidized by tire sales before when when it started out. Now, think of how many Michelin inspectors. fly around the country, make multiple visits to a restaurant. You've got hotel costs. You've got per diems. It is expensive to run the Michelin Guide. So where are they getting the money from? They're getting the money from these tourism boards paying them to enter a new market and from companies like Cisco that sponsor them. Well, Speaker 2 (8:06) it wasn't even subsidized by tires. The whole