Introduction

In the early nineteen hundreds the tire company Michelin created a travel guide that included restaurant ratings. Michelin has since been awarding stars to the restaurants at which they deem the food excellent. The Michelin Star has become the most prestigious culinary award. They award restaurants one to three stars with three being the most prestigious, although even one is coveted.

The Michelin star system has been questioned by many as elitist and unrepresentative, and has been frequently accused of favoring french cooking. I have examined relationships between price point, stars awarded, cuisine, and location to give insight into this prestigious culinary award system and investigate its poor representation and favoring of certain cuisines. In addition, this data can provide insights to general trends in the culinary world such as cuisine price points.

The dataset I am working with, “Michelin Guide Restaurants,” was published on kaggle.com by Jerry Ng, who collected data from the official Michelin Guide to allow people to map restaurants in their area. Ng wrote a blog post (https://jerrynsh.com/how-i-scraped-michelin-guide-using-golang/) detailing his process of collecting this data from the online Michelin Guide. This post talks about his emphasis on collecting “high-quality” data, which ensures its consistency and accuracy. The dataset contains information on all Michelin-awarded restaurants worldwide, including the variables I worked with: location, price level, award, and cuisine. Other variables in the dataset include name, address, amenities, URL, and phone number. For the following visualizations I have narrowed the award category, which in the dataset included restaurants with a Bib Gourmand award or a Green star, to only those with 1-3 stars. Bib Gourmands are awarded to cheaper restaurants who Michelin wants to recognize but have not quite earned a star, and the Green star is awarded to restaurants with outstanding sustainability practices.

Visualizing the Geographic Distribution of Michelin Star Restaurants

The Michelin Guide awards stars worldwide, but only 37 countries have Michelin-starred restaurants currently. When placed on a map, the geographic distribution illustrates that Michelin-starred restaurants are drastically clustered in Europe. Refer to the map below. The other parts of the world that have stars, such as North America, South America, and Asia, have a much sparser spread of awarded restaurants. Africa and Oceania have no Michelin awarded restaurants. This representational inconsistency is likely due to the small number of Michelin inspectors, only around 120 (Gray). Nonetheless, the favoring of Europe is apparent. To extract this information from the original dataset, I isolated the country as a factor and plotted the restaurant counts on a map. Again, the plotted data only includes restaurants with 1-3 stars, not those with a Bib Gourmand award or only a Green star.

Furthermore, the Michelin Group has been criticized for not only favoring Europe, but France in specific. When the data is grouped and counted by country, it reveals France has the most awarded restaurants by around two thirds more than the second-most awarded country, Japan. Reference the bar chart below. French cooking has long been considered by the western world as the “highest” cuisine, though this sentiment is also heavily criticized for its limited perspective. Michelin perpetuates this. This top 10 data also supports Michelin’s favoring of Europe, as seven of ten countries on the list are on the European continent.

The Michelin Group is a French company which likely explains the higher amount of awards, however it can be argued that the disproportionate awarding of French restaurants highlights the company’s cultural bias and lack of representation for global businesses and cuisines. Without insight, this data could mislead someone into believing France has the best restaurants in the world, rather than just heavier representation.

Visualizing Awarded Cuisines

This dataset includes cuisines for each restaurant, which can offer insight into trends in what type of food the Michelin guide prefers. These cuisine names range from broad cultural cuisines, such as Indian, to item specific ones if a restaurant is specialized in, for example, ramen. Many restaurants have multiple cuisines tagged, so the data had to be reformatted to account for this. To produce a word cloud, the data was grouped by Cuisine words and then counted. The more restaurants that have a word in their associated cuisines, the larger the word appears.

The word cloud of Michelin-awarded cuisines below reveals the most commonly appearing words are “modern,” “creative,” and “contemporary.” This strongly suggests that Michelin inspectors prioritize innovation. It should be noted that these words could have appeared in front of any cuisine, such as “Modern British,” not just by itself. Although “traditional” is also fairly large, it is clear that modern and unique cooking is preferred, or at least more applauded. This preference is not necessarily surprising or unfair, seeing as most prestigious awards in any field award innovation.

Michelin Favors Innovation

Average Price Level per Cuisine

It is a commonly held conception that Michelin only awards expensive, fine-dining restaurants. They, however, dispute this claim. They state that “one of the great misconceptions about our guide is that we have a preference for more formal restaurants. This is simply not true… Thankfully we now have Stars in all different styles of restaurant…” This implies that they no longer have a preference for expensive fine-dining restaurants.

This dataset includes a variable for price level, coded in each restaurant’s currency as a number of currency symbols from 1-4, such as “¥¥¥” indicating a price level of 3 out of 4. To calculate the average price level per cuisine, this variable was recorded as a numeric level. For reference, a price level of 1 is considered inexpensive and a price level of 2 is considered a little pricey, while price levels 3 and 4 are expensive. The data was grouped by cuisine and the average price level was calculated for each cuisine. Restaurants with multiple cuisines listed got separated into multiple rows.

The table below shows the average price level per cuisine sorted by most commonly awarded cuisines. The average price levels for the top 10 most awarded cuisines are all in the mid to upper 3 range. This contradicts Michelin’s implication that they do not have a preference for formal restaurants. While they may have diversified over time, they still clearly award expensive restaurants with stars far more. The Michelin Guide only has three restaurant with a price level of 1 currently awarded stars, and few with a price level of 2. The vast majority are at price levels 3 and 4, which is evident in this table. Try searching your favorite cuisine and see not only how awarded it is, but how expensive!

Michelin Favors Expensive Restaurants

Conclusion

Michelin stars, being the most prestigious culinary award, should be representative of the best and most deserving restaurants in the world. However, the data we have looked at today illustrates the variety of biases Michelin has. The inspectors have a preference towards European restaurants, French restaurants, modern cuisine, and expensive restaurants. The awarded restaurants are heavily clustered in Europe, with the other geographic areas looking sparse. Even within that European cluster, France has been awarded a disproportionate amount of stars. The word cloud of cuisine reveals the preference for modern, contemporary, and creative cuisine, implying the inspectors’ preference of innovation. Despite Michelin’s claims of diversity in restaurant prestige, evaluating the average prices of cuisines reveal that Michelin star restaurants tend to be very expensive. Overall, Michelin has some areas in which it should consider its misrepresentation of the “best” restaurants in the world.

Works Cited

Gray, Sebastian. “How Restaurants Are Awarded Michelin Stars.” Truly Experiences, 2023, https://trulyexperiences.com/blog/how-restaurants-are-awarded-michelin-stars/. Accessed 4 December 2023.

Michelin. “History of the MICHELIN Guide.” MICHELIN Guide, https://guide.michelin.com/th/en/history-of-the-michelin-guide-th. Accessed 4 December 2023.

Ng, Jerry. “How I Scraped Michelin Guide Using Golang.” jerrynsh, 2 March 2023, https://jerrynsh.com/how-i-scraped-michelin-guide-using-golang. Accessed 4 December 2023.