Tires, Diners, and Drives

TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING: Suicide

This is a story about two enterprises: one, a trusted name in automotive tires that has been around for over a century, and the other, a deeply secretive organization that publishes fine dining guides that can make or break a chef's career. Both of these enterprises have existed for well over a century, and even share the same name: Michelin!

That has to be a coincidence, right?

...right?

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Transcript

Season 3, Episode 4 – Tires, Diners, and Drives

1.       Hi everyone. I just wanted to give a heads up and a trigger warning. This episode does contain mention of suicide, so if that is at all an issue here, you may want to give this episode a miss. Thanks very much, and on with the show. 

2.       In our world of hyper connectivity, it is something of an inevitability that two very different things will just by coincidence share a name. 

3.       A very famous pop punk band and a very small bit character on the Simpsons both share the name Fall Out Boy, and both sides have gone on the record of not wanting to mention it to the other initially for fear of legal action. 

4.       And God help you if you start looking up a specific person by name and find three other people of various other levels of fame that share the name. 

5.       Warren Ellis (writer for one, musician with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in the other), Kate Hudson (actress for one, actual birth name of Katy Perry in the other), and Chris Evans (The actor who played Captain America or English television presenter). 

6.       Even I am not necessarily immune. Shout out to New York Times bestselling thriller novelist Brad Thor and Brandon Thordarson, the Executive Chef at Moxies Restaurant Group. 

7.       But one of the more famous of these is in theory the two organizations that share the same name: Michelin. 

8.       One of which is a famed and trusted name in tire manufacturing, with a mascot that appears in pretty much every garage and automotive shop. The other is a deeply secretive organization that publishes fine dining guides researched by highly discerning but anonymous reviewers that can make or break a chef’s career. 

9.       Both have existed for over a century, but with such widely differing industries, they must be coincidental, right?

10.   You might think so, but you would be wrong. The tire company absolutely 100% runs the dining guide. I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and this is What?! Explain.  

11.   The story of the Michelin company started with Édouard and André Michelin trying to save their grandfathers manufacturing business, but ended up having large amounts of tire-based success instead.

12.   They created the first removable pneumatic bicycle tire in 1891, which was tested out in a bicycle race from Paris to Brest and back again with great success. 

13.   Once the automobile became in vogue, they were pioneers in that regard as well, creating the first rubber automotive tire, the first tire to be able to withstand speeds above 100kmh, and the first removable tire rim. They even moved their rubber tire mastery into the locomotive territory, creating the first rubber-tired train in 1931. 

14.   So, what exactly caused these very successful tire-manufacturing brothers to start a side-business for travel guides? Well, perhaps side business was a bit generous, as they were literally giving them away at the start of their foray into guides. 

15.   They started producing these guides in 1900 as an addition to their tire business.  For all intents and purposes, it was designed as an advertising tool to get people travelling around France, telling of all the potential places that you could visit in France, if only you had a car. 

16.   Given that there were less than 3000 cars owned in the entirety of France when the Michelin brothers first set up shop, getting people to BUY the cars that would need these tires was a high priority. So, they highlighted potential tourist locations, places to go, roads to take, convenient gas stations, hotels, and inns to stay at, and most importantly, places to eat. 

17.   These guides had the effect of encouraging car owners in France to go further afield than just within their region: they now had options to stay in bucolic inns along the road, take detours to drive through scenic countryside views, and overall take much longer trips than would strictly be necessary to get from point A to point B. 

18.   The benefit for the Michelin brothers? These new much further afield motorists needed new tires more often, and if the makers of the guides that they were following coincidentally ALSO made tires, why wouldn’t they buy them?

19.   The success of the guide in France led Michelin to expand this part of their business, publishing a guide to Belgium in a similar fashion in 1904, Algeria and Tunisia in 1907, Switzerland and the Netherlands in 1908, and the expansion continued until most countries in Western Europe had one form of the guide or another by 1914. 

20.   They continued to be given away until André  Michelin  noticed that a stack of the guides was being used in a garage he was at to balance out a work bench. Somewhat incensed that his works were just being used in pretty much the same way as your average piece of wood, he started charging 750 francs per copy, or about $37 in today’s money from 1922 onwards. 

21.   With this additional source of income, they made changes in the guides, in particular adding hotel listings and expanding the restaurant section of the guide. 

22.   The brothers managed this expansion of restaurants reviewed by establishing a team of anonymous food inspectors that they used as an unbribable, fully impartial restaurant reviewers. 

23.   The first Michelin star system was created in 1920, with second- and third-star reviews being created in 1931. By 1936, the definition of what the stars would represent was cemented in place, where it would stay almost unchanged for the next eighty years. 

24.   One Michelin star meant that a restaurant was ‘a very good restaurant in its own category’, two stars meant ‘excellent cooking, and worth a detour’, and three stars meant ‘exceptional cuisine, worth a special trip’. 

25.   The methods that the Michelin company has gone through to maintain their inspector’s anonymity is the stuff of urban legend. Top executives at Michelin often have not met anyone who has disclosed that they are an inspector, and those hired to be inspectors are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents, by virtue that they may boast about it. 

26.   Another aspect of how Michelin guides maintain their impartiality is that unlike many reviewers, restaurants do not pay for their meals. The profits from the tire sales part of the Michelin company helps defray the costs of the inspector’s salaries, travel budget, and food budget, which if you eat exclusively at fancy restaurants, it can… get expensive. 

27.   Many of the inspectors eat out over 200 days of the year, for both lunch and dinner, ordering the maximum number of courses allowed at the restaurant. They are required by Michelin to finish all their food, and to order their dishes to see the skills and competencies of the kitchen. If they feel that their anonymity was compromised, they do not return to the restaurant, and in fact are often relocated to another area. 

28.   After they finish a meal, they are required to write a detailed report on every aspect of their experience, including ambiance of the restaurant, whether it has an interesting view, the glassware, the wine list, the preparation of the food, the quality of the ingredients, the plating, and many other parts of the whole experience of the restaurant. 

29.   Often this can take up to three hours per restaurant, and the reports are sent to a Michelin office in the area, where they are distilled into ratings, primarily for the star scale of the restaurant, but also for a few other ratings, including the Couvert range, which ranks the ambience, comfort, and service of a given restaurant, as well as symbols for notable wine lists, and interesting cocktail and beer lists.   

30.   While it may seem that being paid to eat at restaurants is a decent way to earn a living, there are some emphatic downsides to the job of a Michelin restaurant inspector. 

31.   In 2004, a man named Pascal Rémy published a book called “L’Inspecteur Se Met (May) à Table” or “The Inspector Sits Down at a Table”, based on his diary of fifteen years working as an inspector for Michelin. 

32.   Contrary to the glamorous lifestyle expected, Rémy detailed weeks on end driving around the French countryside, dining alone and under pressure to write detailed reports by the end of the day. Inspectors were underpaid, overworked, and there were always far fewer of them than Michelin claimed. 

33.   Michelin was always coy about exactly how many inspectors they hired, but always hinted that it was above 100 to cover Europe. Rémy stated that even when he started in 1988, there were only eleven in France, and when he was fired in 2004, there were only five, 

34.   far too few to conduct the “several times a year” visits that Michelin claimed that they did with all starred restaurants. Michelin denied Rémy’s allegations at the time, but still refused to divulge exactly how many inspectors they hired. 

35.   Despite these allegations, the popularity of the Michelin name, combined with the seeming impartiality of the anonymous inspectors caused the Michelin guide to be considered THE defining restaurant reviewing system, with many chefs deeming it their life goal to open a restaurant that would be given three Michelin stars. 

36.   But with those Michelin stars comes a very large amount of pressure to MAINTAIN those stars. Gordon Ramsay claimed to have wept when one of his restaurants went from two stars to zero stars, 

37.   and French Chef Marc Veyrat took Michelin to court to demand why his restaurant was demoted from three stars to two stars, claiming that the loss of said star caused him to suffer from depression for months. But nowhere was this pressure more pronounced than with the story of Chef Bernard Loiseau. 

38.   Loiseau’s primary goal in life, as it was for many of his contemporaries, was to open a restaurant that would have three Michelin stars. After sixteen years of work, he managed to do so, with his restaurant La Côte d'Or receiving a three-star Michelin rating in 1991. However, his struggles did not end there. 

39.   Many of his clientele now had much more elevated expectations now that they were dining in a three-star Michelin restaurant, and any perceived imperfection would no longer be tolerated. To counter this, Loiseau began working much longer hours directly supervising the work in the restaurant, often over a hundred hours in each week. 

40.   As time went on, a newer wave of Asian-inspired fusion food swept France by storm, leaving the more traditional La Côte d'Or in its wake. The restaurant went from a 19/20 in the Gault et Millau (Go a Mijo) guide to a 17/20 in 2003, fuelling rumors that Loiseau was losing his touch. 

41.   The loss of a Michelin star seemed inevitable. Suffering from severe bouts of clinical depression, swimming in debt and plagued by rumors of his clientele departing his restaurant, Loiseau committed suicide on February 24, 2003, hours after supervising the lunch rush at La Côte d'Or. 

42.   While there were headlines made about Loiseau’s alleged statement to another chef that if he lost a Michelin star, he would kill himself, the increased debt load and decreasing patronage, as well as the bouts of clinical depression were stated as the primary cause in most accounts. 

43.   The Michelin guide is not as unchallenged in North America as it was in Europe. Customer-driven review publications and sites such as Zagat and Yelp are viewed far more often, and tend to have a much larger scope than the individual cities and regions that Michelin guides tend to have. 

44.   Additionally, the use of the anonymous food inspector tended to raise questions among some chefs on the qualifications of these inspectors to judge their food. Often, these questions do come from chefs either not receiving a star, or having their star count reduced, so take it with a grain of salt. 

45.   The Michelin guide has had a significant impact in dining and on the proliferation of the automobile in Europe in its earlier days. However, the largest effect it had in a direct way happened near the end of World War 2, when the allies were slowly taking back Nazi-occupied France. 

46.   In the spring of 1944, when the Normandy landing was being organized, one of the issues that was brought up was that their progression would be delayed in the urban areas of France, where all signage had been taken down and destroyed by the Vichy government in power. 

47.   They needed some intelligence that had very accurate maps of cities that could be used when signage was not available. After mulling over all their potential options, Allied command concluded: the 1939 Michelin Guide to France – the last edition on record before the second world war stated, was their best bet. 

48.   The guide, along with the hundreds of detailed city maps of locations in France were reprinted in Washington and distributed to officers landing in Normandy. As a result, on D-Day when troops landed and liberated many of the cities in France from Nazi control, they did so with a handy copy of the 1939 Michelin Guide. 

49.   A surprisingly large contribution to history from a publication that was initially meant to sell more tires. I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks. 

50.   Theme music and Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, and script editing by Sara Smith, who tell me that making an episode title about the creation of the Michelin guide a play on a Guy Fieri show is… somewhat questionable.  

51.   If you want to be up to date with all things podcast-related, why not follow us on Instagram at Whatexplaincast and on our Facebook page as What?! Explain. Podcast. 

52.   Don’t forget to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you have some time, please rate and review us! 

53.   Word of mouth still remains an excellent way to tell people about the show, so if you have a friend, family member, or person you suspect is a strictly regimented anonymous restaurant reviewer in YOUR life that may be interested, please tell them about it!

54.   Thanks very much, and I’ll talk to you all later!