Exploring The Michelin Guide worldwide
Among the culinary world, there are few greater accolades for a restaurant than being awarded a Michelin star (or three!), or being listed as one of the best in the world by a reputable guide. Foodies and fine dine lovers like myself, see the experience of dining at one of these award winning restaurants, as just that, an experience, and thus take to looking at guides such as The Michelin Guide and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants — arguably the two most well known guides — to help determine which restaurant is next worth their time and money to visit.
But what makes a restaurant worthy of being on these lists or awarded a Michelin star? How exactly does the spread of Michelin stars and the top 50 restaurants look like not only across the UK, but also the world, and what more can we understand about the types of restaurants that have received these awards? Ultimately, which list should a foodie be looking at?
By extensively scraping and compiling data to enable exploration of both The Michelin Guide and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, I set out to find answers to the above and determine a pattern of the types of restaurants rated as the most worth visiting around the world — and come to a conclusion about which guide is the most influential, giving the most worthwhile information for those seeking the best culinary experiences.
If you’re hungry for more (pun intended!), my full Jupyter notebook with Python code is here, and full analysis with many more insights and thoughts is here. Let’s get stuck in!
The Michelin Guide
The 2020 Michelin Guide, implemented across 31 countries worldwide at the time of writing, includes 3,299 restaurants — a lot of restaurants to analyse!
The guide explains its award system as:
One star: “a very good restaurant”
Two stars: “excellent cooking that is worth a detour”
Three stars: “exceptional cuisine that is worth a special journey”
Japan leads with the most starred restaurants worldwide (669), expected - given the far greater number of restaurants in the larger Japanese cities comparatively to other large cities across the world. eg. Paris has approx 40,000 restaurants, whereas Tokyo has around 160,000 restaurants. Japan, France and Italy make up 50% of the entire Michelin guide.
There are 2657 (81%) one star restaurants, 507 (15%) two star and 135 (4%) three star included in the guides worldwide. It indeed does seem that gaining three stars is a very rare achievement amongst restaurants! Once again, Japan leads with the most 3 star restaurants, followed by France, Italy and Germany- following the pattern of countries with the most starred restaurants.
Excitingly, for food lovers, the variety of cuisines included in The Michelin Guide is vast, with 103 cuisines included worldwide. However, modern cuisine takes the lead overall by a huge amount, accounting for 708 restaurants on the list (21%). Three starred restaurants are found amongst 20 of these cuisines.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Guide is an annual ranking of restaurants across the world, deemed to be the best in the world by a panel of chefs, food writers and culinary experts.
Restaurants in The Word’s 50 Best Restaurant list 2019 are spread across 25 countries, with Spanish restaurants dominating 7 of the 50 spots.
United Kingdom
The UK sits in 6th place in the hierarchy of countries with the most Michelin starred restaurants, with 169 starred restaurants spread country-wide across 83 cities/towns, broken down as:
144 one star restaurants, 20 two star restaurants, 5 three star restaurants.
As can be expected, London has the lions share of these restaurants (63), however, outside of the capital, many of these restaurants are found in smaller towns or villages which one might not normally visit.
2 restaurants from the UK have also made it onto The World’s 50 Best Restaurant list, both having 1 Michelin star and based in London.
So let’s now compare the two guides.
Of the 25 countries that have made it onto The World’s 50 Best list, there are 17 countries which feature in The Michelin Guide also. The remaining 8 countries included in The World 50 Best, where The Michelin Guide does not yet stretch, account for 11 restaurants on the list. Those countries are:
Peru, Mexico, Russia, Chile, Argentina, Slovenia, South Africa, Colombia.
We can see from the chart below that for some of these countries, their presence in both guides differs greatly. For instance, Japan has the most restaurants featured in The Michelin Guide, however in The World 50 Best, Japan comes joint 4th with 5 other countries, with the percentages extremely different (20.3% vs 4.1%)
Why might that be? One of the main reasons may well be that The Michelin Guide does not yet cover the entire world, whereas The World 50 Best, according to its website and its name, does indeed cover the world — or more of it. So there may be less scope, for example, for Japanese restaurants to take a bigger chunk of the top 50. Another reason, could be that The World 50 Best may have a more Eurocentric approach and bias towards neglecting the Asian countries, as it has been criticised to have so in the past. The organisers do however claim that their process is fair and unbiased.
As outlined earlier, three stars are defined by the Michelin Guide as a restaurant worthy of a special trip — the best of the best. We therefore might have assumed that all the restaurants named as the 50 best in the world, would be of three Michelin star calibre. However, this isn’t the case. 34 of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants have one or more Michelin star (18 three star restaurants, 9 two star, and 7 one star restaurant), leaving 16 restaurants classed as being the “best in the world” which do not have the award of one Michelin star or more.
Whilst not all are of three Michelin star quality, it does follow our instinct however that proportionally, to how many three star restaurants there are worldwide, the proportion on this top 50 list (36% three star, 18% two star, 14% one star, 32% no star) is higher than in The Michelin Guide itself — hence reinforcing the three Michelin star accolade as a mark of a truly special restaurant.
It does appear that for the most part, the two guides complement each other, rather than contradict. With 76% of restaurants listed in the World 50 Best list also having been awarded one Michelin star or more, it does seem as though judges from both guides are having the same exceptional dining experiences at these establishments.
For now, foodies and those looking for gastronomic experiences, will probably continue to look at both these guides side by side to plan which restaurant will be next on their bucket list. Countries and restaurants featured on both lists are certainly deemed high on the culinary destination list, many of which will have booked out waiting lists from eager diners!
