This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Question: How did an anthropomorphic stack
of tires end up as the global authority on fine dining? Yes, the Michelin guide
that famously assigns one to three stars to only the finest and snootiest of restaurants
all around the world — this is made by the same people who make tires. Oh, I'm sorry,
Brits. By tire, of course, I mean tyre. Michelin is Michelin. Though I will be switching
between the French and American pronunciations for the purposes of rhetoric and humor, Michelin and
Michelin are the same company. This is funny because when most of us today think about car
tires, we think of the blue collar automotive repair and maintenance services industry. Honest
and essential, but low status. In contrast, the kind of restaurant deemed worthy of a single
Michelin star, let alone three, is generally a haunt of the elite international business class.
The global aristocracy eats here, and man, do they pay for it. The kind of people whom I imagine eat
at these places — the closest they ever get to a tire is when they reach their hand out of the
window of their Peugeot to tip the valet. So again, how did the inedible rubber cousin of
the Pillsbury Doughboy end up telling bourgeoisie where to dine? Well, we have to go back, way back
before the automobile became a mere utilitarian object ubiquitous across all classes in developed
countries. Indeed, you could say that cars are really tools of the lower classes these days,
since the super-rich can afford to live in ultra-dense urban centers, like Manhattan,
where they have everything they need at their fingertips and great public transportation.
The rest of the normals out there don't have that, so they have to drive cars.
In the late 19th century, there were just a few hundred automobiles in all of France.
This is according to historian Herbert Lottman, author of The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire.
Lottman writes, "These early autos remained rich men's toys [...] unable to stray very far from
the vicinity of a reliable repair shop." Even if it didn't break down all the time,
you would be a fool to drive your voiture very far from your maison.
Even if you got where you were going, there's no guarantee someone would be selling petrol
there for you to get back home. There's no guarantee you would find where you were going,
because there was no numbering system for French roads and maps were unreliable. Oh, and get this.
If you blow a tire, you're going to be stuck on the side of the road for at least a day.
This is because the first generation of pneumatic tires were glued to the wheel rim.
To replace the tire, you'd have to glue on a new one and let it dry overnight.
This is until French brothers Édouard and André Michelin came up with the basic design everybody
still uses to this day where the tire is held in place by tension, not glue. The Michelin brothers
were heirs to a family farm equipment factory, and their first tires were for bicycles, not cars.
The younger brother, Édouard, he actually ran the factory out in the provinces.
The older brother, André, he stayed in Paris and handled marketing and public relations, at which
he was a stone-cold genius. Today, André Michelin is hailed as a pioneer of indirect marketing.
He understood that the market for Michelin tires would be tiny until rubber-wheel-based
transportation became way more practical and enjoyable and accessible to the masses.
Michelin is very much the French counterpart of the American industrialist Henry Ford.
These are men who fully believed that if they could just advance mass production along with
mass consumption, well, then they could make everybody rich,
especially themselves, and I suppose they were right.
From here on I'm drawing heavily from this book by American historian Stephen Harp,
Making Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in 20th Century France.
The Michelin brothers did a number of things to promote the automobile lifestyle in France,
and thereby stimulate demand for their product. They sponsored races, which were inevitably won by
the vehicles with Michelin tires because Michelin tires were legit way better than their earliest
competitors. When Michelin got into the airplane business, they offered prizes for various feats
of early aviation. They promoted a national road numbering system in France. They made better maps,
and they still make maps to this day. And they made The Michelin Guide,
the first edition of which published in 1900. They gave it out for free. It was a list of all of the
establishments in France that a motorist might need; repair shops, petrol stations, hotels, and
restaurants. The growth of this new automobile lifestyle in France was very much interrelated
with the growth of gastronomy in France and the birth of the French restaurant industry,
which is really the birth of the Western restaurant industry.
That's a history we'll talk more about another day, but it all has
roots in the French Revolution; the notion that the common man could ennoble himself
by accessing and learning to appreciate the finer things in life — things that had previously been
reserved for the hereditary aristocracy. "A noble table embiggens the smallest man."
That promise of the early restaurant industry is very much the same promise
of the automobile industry — that it was going to empower the common man to become his own Lord,
to get behind the wheel of his own life. It is, of course, ironic that this dream of
industrial egalitarianism in France was built upon the subjugation of people in French colonies,
like Vietnam, where they grew the rubber trees for the tires. But anyway.
As Stephen Harp observes in his book, Michelin tires quickly lost their competitive
advantages in the early 20th century. From the U.K. came Dunlop tires — I apparently
have Dunlop tires myself. From the U.S. came Goodyear and Goodrich and Firestone tires.
But Michelin was able to maintain its position in the French market by making itself a symbol
of French nationalism. And indeed, more than a symbol — an instrument of French nationalism.
Michelin became the #1 funder of natalist movement in France, which tried to persuade French women
to have more babies — make more Frenchmen. And the guide itself became an instrument of
nationalism because it empowered and encouraged Parisians to
go out, venture forth into the provinces, and Michelin's promotion of French gastronomy was
also an instrument of nationalism. France had come to define itself as the Western capital of
fine food and drink. California had the movie industry, France had the restaurant industry, and
the guide became the Academy Awards of cooking. To the uninitiated, one star might seem like a
terrible review, until you learn that the vast majority of eating establishments get absolutely
zero stars. Even really great places get zero stars. In recent editions, Michelin has tried
to introduce non-star designations to recognize places that have awesome food, but they don't
rise to the level of Michelin-starred cuisine, which is generally super fancy and super fussy.
In publishing guides for places beyond France, Michelin became an instrument of French
imperialism; judging restaurants in New York and Tokyo by the standards of French fine dining,
thereby influencing chefs all around the world to internalize those French standards.
Check this out. This is the most recent edition of a Michelin Guide, and in the
preface where they explain their methodology. They reassure you, dear reader, that their "highest
awards are considered at a European level." This of course implies that restaurants outside
of Europe are inherently inferior and they would need to be graded on a curve in order to come in
anywhere close us to the European restaurants. In fact, Michelin currently awards its maximum
of three stars to about 30 restaurants in France, but only 13 in the United States,
and three in China. These are countries far larger than France and countries where, I assure you,
there is no shortage of good stuff to eat. Now, in fairness to Michelin, they do not claim to review
every single high-level restaurant in a place like China as they do in Western European countries.
Here in the States, Michelin only reviews restaurants in New York, Chicago, Washington
D.C., and California, and there is definitely Michelin-star-level food happening in Portland
and New Orleans and Boston but Michelin isn't even trying to review it. Yet.
As a result, The Michelin Guide is not nearly as influential and famous here in the states as it is
in Europe. Maybe it is in New York. But overall, I would say that the real Oscars of cooking in
the United States are the James Beard awards, even though the James Beard awards go to chefs not to
restaurants, and that is a meaningful distinction. But anyway. All of that explains why the tire
guy is the European arbiter of fine dining. Whether you are chasing Michelin stars or not,
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Of course, if you just need to let clients make simple appointments on your website, they have
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to pay Squarespace to host the site for you on the internet, or to register your custom domain,
use my code RAGUSEA. You'll save 10%. That's three-star service if
I've ever seen it. Thank you Squarespace. And thank you, Michelin brothers. Do I actually
want to thank them? Do I actually think that this has been a net good on the culinary world?