Keep Michelin men out of our hotels!

It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a surprising innovation: Michelin stars for hotels. Though the stars are stylised as ‘keys’.

This may not seem like big pommes de terre, but it is quite important. Because, if the concept takes off and hotels start striving for Michelin accolades, then we can expect the best and most ambitious to go the same way as Michelin-mad restaurants. And that will be bad.

You could argue it shouldn’t be a problem, as hotels already have star ratings. But these are approximate and informal rankings, indicating the rough level of facilities. They do not impose a certain view of what a hotel should be. Whereas Michelin standards are much more precise, onerous and stifling.

In my demanding job of travel writer, sometimes specialising in luxury travel (it’s hard and lonely work, etc.), I have encountered an awful lot of Michelin-recommended food. My reaction to it is mostly ‘meh’.

It’s not that the food is always poor – though I have, surprisingly often, endured some dire Michelin-starred cooking. I recall a storied two-star in Lyon (a city regarded as the cradle of haute cuisine) where one dish of weird pike thingies in a grotesquely over-rich sauce almost made me vomit. The rest of the meal was tricksy and meticulous and entirely unmemorable, apart from the bill (about €400 for two).

And this is one of my main objections to Michelin food. Because the tucker is predictably prissy, fussy and elaborate, designed to please Michelin inspectors with their rigid Cartesian rules, it will be largely forgettable, or boringly similar to Michelin food elsewhere.