Why Some of the World’s Most Famous Chefs Don’t Want a Michelin Star

Like Ellis, the inspector insisted that they much prefer to award stars than to take them away. “We’re almost giddy when we find a new star,” she says, “or when we go back to a one-star that is maybe headed towards two or three. That’s something we still get very excited about. And in the case of a decision like Daniel, we go to a restaurant over and over and over again.”

When asked to define what the stars actually mean, she explained, “A three-star experience should be almost perfect…. There should be something memorable about it—something that sparks. At the three-star level, it’s a meal you’re not going to forget.”

When you start as a Michelin inspector, your first weeks of training are abroad, she says. “You go to the mother ship in France. Depending on your language skills, maybe you go to another European country and train with an inspector there.” There’s no prescribed path to becoming a food inspector, “though inspectors are all lifers in one way or another,” she explained, and they usually come from families devoted to food and the table. “One inspector was a chef at a very well-known, three-star restaurant, another came from a hotel…. I think you’re either built for this or you’re not,” she added. “You have to really be an independent personality. You have to be somewhat solitary but also work as part of a team. You have to be comfortable dining alone. Most of the time, I think, inspectors all live in a perpetual state of paranoia. That’s the job: the C.I.A. but with better food.”

Cooking Up a Storm

Of the six three-star restaurants in New York, five of them are in Manhattan: Masa, Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Jean Georges. Masa, in the Time Warner building, at 10 Columbus Circle, on the same floor as Thomas Keller’s Per Se, is the only sushi restaurant in New York to have earned three stars. Masayoshi Takayama is the owner, creator, and chef. The room is small, with only 26 seats, and I entered through a massive door opened by a welcoming Japanese woman.

Chef Takayama, 61, a tall, youthful-looking man with a shaved head, sat at a table while an assistant poured green tea into tiny cups. The restaurant was designed by the chef—including a small pond, and an impressive sushi bar that cost $60,000. “It’s hinoki wood,” Takayama explained, “which is the wood used in a Japanese shrine. It’s very special, especially the smell—it’s beautiful. Very dense, very hard wood, white, clean. That’s the spiritual wood.”

A 1920 advertisement for the Guide Michelin.

From Rue des Archives/Granger, NYC.

Such spirituality doesn’t come cheap. Dinner at Masa can run around $500 a person and might feature kue flown in from Kyushu Island—“a very, very rare fish available only eight weeks out of the year, only in the wintertime. It costs $2,000 for 12 pounds of fish. It has a really extraordinary taste—it’s an amazing fish,” explains Takayama.

The chef also has the restaurant Kappo Masa, on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, and two restaurants in Las Vegas. Before he opens a new restaurant, he plans the food to fit the neighborhood. “I spent many days standing in the street,” he explains. “I see all the people walking—I see what they eat, where they’re going, what they wear. Then I create the kind of menu that works for this location.” He notes that on New York’s Madison Avenue “the people are fashionable, very thin, they move quickly. So I designed a fish pasta—100 percent fish, no gluten, no wheat—only for Madison people. They love it.”

He was 12 when he began cooking in his home in Japan, helping his father and mother’s catering business deliver sashimi to neighbors, for weddings, wakes, and funerals. He remembers a dish called kai, which is sea bream: “It’s a kind of happiness. Twelve inches of sea bream, grilled. If there are a hundred people at the wake, we’d grill a hundred pieces.” He worked in Tokyo’s renowned Sushi-Ko before moving to Los Angeles, where he eventually opened Ginza Sushi-Ko, one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, which he owned for nearly 20 years. “Then [California restaurateur] Thomas Keller called me. He said, ‘We have a new project in the Time Warner building.’ ”

Attempting to explain why Japan has more Michelin restaurants than any other country, Takayama says, “We are always looking for beauty, simplicity, and detail…. The Japanese have a philosophy in all of their best things—looking to make them better, better, better…. Early morning when I wake up, I’m cooking in my head. I can smell the cooking, even in bed. I can taste it, I can feel the texture. The Michelin people realize how beautifully done, how perfectly done—all the details. But the real critics,” he adds, “are the people…. They judge. Every single day I have to hit the home run.”

For quite a while, Eleven Madison Park had only one star, chef Daniel Humm explains, “and people thought we were underrated, but I never cared. I almost appreciated being the restaurant that was underrated—it’s kind of a beautiful place to be. It’s a lot easier to exceed expectations. Then Michelin moved us from one to three, right away. You can’t deny it—it’s an unbelievable feeling to get three Michelin stars…. It was a goal so big that I was afraid of even the thought.” Humm’s restaurant career began when, as a 14-year-old Swiss boy, he dropped out of school to earn money for a $2,000 racing bicycle. The only place he could find a job was in a restaurant kitchen, chopping vegetables. While there, he learned how to make hollandaise and how to debone a pig. As a young man he graduated to what was then a three-star restaurant, Le Pont de Brent, near Lake Geneva, where he was mentored by chef Gérard Rabaey. The rest is history: Eleven Madison Park is ranked No. 5 in the latest World’s 50 Best Restaurants, the only New York restaurant listed in the Top 10. (Le Bernardin comes in next, at No. 18, then Per Se, at No. 40.)

Will Guidara, who is Humm’s business partner, grew up in the restaurant trade. His father, Frank Guidara, was for 10 years the president of the restaurant division of Restaurant Associates, the fabled company from the Mad Men era that once owned Tavern on the Green, the Four Seasons, Forum of the Twelve Caesars, La Fonda del Sol, and Brasserie. They were the inventors of the theme restaurant in New York. “In my era,” Frank recalls, “Michelin stars were unobtainable outside of Europe, and pretty much outside of France.”

Back then the restaurants in New York were run by the maître d’s, such as Henri Soulé, at Le Pavillon, or Sirio Maccioni, at Le Cirque. The chef was little more than an employee, and the food was often beside the point. “There was no incentive to become a cook—all the incentive existed in becoming a restaurateur,” recalls Will. But that all changed in the decades that followed. Today chefs at two-star restaurants generally make six-figure salaries, and celebrity chefs make tens of millions a year.

When Will started working service in fine dining the chefs terrified him. “I tried not to get yelled at by the chef. I found that in fine dining, the higher up the food chain you got, the more maniacal and tyrannical the chef was becoming.” He subsequently worked for the famed New York restaurateur Danny Meyer (who owns Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack, among others), helping him open restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art. Two and a half years later, Meyer had his vision for Eleven Madison Park, housed on the ground floor of the Metropolitan Life North Building. “Danny came to me,” Will recalls, “and said, ‘What about Eleven Madison Park?’ So, I was like, ‘Dude, I told you I didn’t want anything to do with fine dining!’ ”

But meeting Daniel Humm changed his mind. “I believe he’s one of the best chefs in the world. He became my closest friend,” says Will. It helped that the two men decided early on that “the kitchen and the dining room needed to play nice together. That’s not often the case in restaurants like this…. It’s mostly like an arranged marriage, but for us it’s true love.”