Top Chef, Michelin, 50 Best, & James Beard: The Race for Restaurant Recognition!!
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How does the Cisco partnership affect the credibility of the Michelin Guide?
Today on The Chef's Cut, we are talking about the murky relationship between Cisco and the Michelin Guide.
Give me three bags of charcoal and three stars. Thank you.
Whether or not winning Top Chef is more important than winning a James Beard Award.
I don't think anyone listening to this or watching this will think I don't have a bias.
And why diners might be the most important voices of all.
If guests still care, guests still care.
That's the actual arbiter. But first, Chef's Cut Nation, you know what time it is. We need 10 seconds of your day. Please rate and review the show wherever you get your pods. It really helps.
Michelin star season is right around the corner. They're going to start dropping those plaques off door to door. And I think Michelin has been getting a lot of heat lately. I feel like in the last few years, they've been getting a ton.
We're part of that. We're part of bringing that heat because
I don't
understand what they're doing.
Now they got this two-year-old relationship with Cisco. So they're getting a ton of heat for that conflict of interest type stuff. You have the James Beard where Tom Colicchio, multi-James Beard award winner, beacon of the industry, comes out and says winning Top Chef is as important as winning the James Beard award, which you could not imagine someone saying when we went on the show, let alone when it began. And then you got the world's 50 best rebranding itself as the 50.
Right.
Yeah.
Like it's like a TRL music video list. Now it's like, oh, tune into the 50. See if Britney Spears is still on top.
And that's the thing. These awards used to be I mean, they were the be all end all of our industry. You lived and died by getting one of these awards.
And I feel like those those like crazy old people who are like, it's not what it used to be. You know, it used to be something. That's how I feel sometimes when we talk about this. But I think the conversation needs to be had. And I think we have to start with Michelin. Yeah, I think they're the biggest elephant in the room right now.
Yeah,
because the whole Cisco thing.
It's wild. It's like when people say and speculate about awards being pay to play, this Cisco Michelin partnership does nothing to dispel the pay to play questions that people have. Because it started off with Cisco sponsoring the Texas ceremony in 2024.
And the Texas ceremony, that's the one where they like invite all the chefs down and they announce. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
OK. And it's one thing to know that tourism boards pay Michelin to come in. We've known that for a while now. Michelin doesn't just arbitrarily say, I heard there was an amazing restaurant off in the northwest corner of Idaho. Let me get up there and check out what this chef is doing. No, the tourism board of Idaho has to pay for Michelin.
Does Idaho even have a northwest corner?
Do they even have a tourism board?
I don't
know. But Michelin is not this independent arbiter of restaurants in good taste that we all thought that it was. And we've seen that over the years with being paid by tourism boards to enter a new market. And then you add to that the Cisco relationship and it gets a little murkier.
I think it gets way murkier. But, you know, I think people are really upset about the Cisco thing, right? Because I think it creates at least the appearance that like people who are working with them are going to have preferential treatment, which is like, how could you not feel that way? Whether it's in good faith or not, like that's the appearance when you have Cisco reps dropping off Michelin plaques.
Thank you.
It's impossible not to have any correlation between the two. Right. Yeah. And whether or not that's true, I don't think it matters. It's the appearance. And for me, it's like the Cisco thing is just another brick in the road of like Michelin going way, way off course. And I think and it's not the most egregious to me, though.
I think that they started to go off the rails when they started issuing plaques for Michelin-recommended restaurants as opposed to just starred restaurants.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How does the Cisco partnership affect the credibility of the Michelin Guide?
0:13–4:39
2
Why are tourism boards paying Michelin to enter new markets?
4:39–7:54
3
What’s the difference between Michelin stars and the newer recommended plaques?
7:54–11:43
4
Is winning *Top Chef* more valuable for a restaurant than a James Beard award?
11:43–15:29
5
How independent is the James Beard judging process and why does it matter?
15:29–20:11
6
What changes came with the rebranding of *The World’s 50 Best* to *The 50*?
20:11–24:16
7
Do culinary awards still drive bookings, press coverage, and revenue?
24:16–29:04
8
Who ultimately decides if an award matters – industry insiders or everyday diners?
29:04–32:10
Speakers
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