One evening, in the early days of the restaurant, I was sat at the bar with the team at the end of a shift. We were drinking wine and going through the orders and prep lists for the following day when a man in a dark suit appeared furtively at my side. He and his dining partner had been sat at table six and were the only guests left with us.
‘Are you Mr Buckley?’ he whispered into my ear.
‘Depends who’s asking,’ I joked, wincing at my ever apparent over-familiarisation.
‘My name is Mr G****,’ he announced, presenting an identity card from his inside jacket pocket. The way in which this was carried out I was expecting to look down to see MI5. My eyes arrived at the print where I found, emblazoned on the surface, the logo of Michelin. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’
I stuttered, somehow more surprised than if it had been a member of her majesty’s secret service. As we walked towards the lounge area of the restaurant the inspector started to quiz me on my lineage. ‘Where might we have met before Mr Buckley? You were with Mr Kitching yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And would we have met you at Mr Rogan’s establishment?’
‘Yes.’
He continued to talk in the royal ‘We’ for the rest of our interaction. He wore an air of clandestine mystery like a Jedi might wear a cloak.
The inspector was top heavy, suited in a well-worn pinstripe that fit snugly over his tell-tale barrel-like stature. His elocution was impeccable and along with his equine profile I was reminded of Jeremy Brett from the 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He held the same stern countenance and gravitas, which he relished; his own words favoured him as a sort of apparition from a time gone by.
We sat down and he regaled me with the full history of Michelin. He told me all about the brothers who had set up a tyre company; that they had produced a small guide filled with road maps, petrol stations and places to stop and eat in order to encourage people to take long drives which would result in more worn tyres. The first guide was free but three decades later under the premise that ‘man only respects what he pays for’ the brothers began to charge seven francs for the guide and included, for the first time, a list of hotels and restaurants in Paris. At the same time the brothers enlisted a group of mystery diners to visit the restaurants anonymously to review them. By 1936 the guide was publishing the star system we know today: one star for a very good restaurant in its category, two stars is ‘excellent cooking, worth a detour’ and three is ‘exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey’.
The guide now boasts its presence in over thirty territories across three continents, listing over 30,000 establishments. Amongst dining circles its reputation is incomparable and within the industry its influence is more tangible than ever. Nothing comes with higher merit than to eat or to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant and it is the pinnacle of any chef’s career to win a Michelin star.
We talked at length about my philosophy in the kitchen, the role of Michelin and the restaurants of today. I was told that inspectors only reveal themselves on occasions when they have had a meal of significant quality, and that this had been one. I was told that if we continued to cook this way we could be seeing the restaurant in the Michelin Guide soon.
Through all of this I felt like I was part of a play, faced with an inspector that could just as easily been from Scotland Yard a century ago as the world’s foremost secret dining club. As Mr G**** left I half expected to see a dense shroud of fog rise up in which he disappeared without trace.