Why are some of San Francisco’s top chefs turning down Michelin stars?

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When the owner of “the world’s best restaurant,” Noma in Copenhagen, announced in January that it would close as a full-fledged business next year, the media, under pressure, prepared a feast of ideas about what the closing of the loud shutters meant for the rest of the restaurant world. Among other questions people have been asking, is haute cuisine dead?

Not yet, apparently. It doesn’t take much scrolling to realize that the world of food is still obsessed with rewards. Michelin, the French tire company with a hilarious mascot that looks like it’s hanging out with the Kool-Aid Man, remains the painstaking gold standard.

But over the past three years, restaurant owners and workers have questioned the high costs of earning the award, especially in the Bay Area. Covid has reinforced what many of us already knew: while it’s the culinary capital and one of the most expensive subways in the world, the Bay Area isn’t always welcoming to those in the hospitality industry.

Finding high-quality ingredients and keeping an award-winning establishment running smoothly becomes even more of a challenge in such an expensive area. And like any other city, the pandemic and its aftermath has destabilized our bars and restaurants, exposing inadequate wages and general fragility in the fine dining industry.

The past few months alone have provided us with many object lessons. Chef Aaron London closed his hugely popular Michelin-starred eatery AL’s Place last summer, vowing to spend more time with his partner and daughter while he considers his next move.

At the end of December, Manresa, the culinary gem in Los Gatos that received the coveted three Michelin stars, closed after chef David Kinch decided to focus on other projects.

Then, when news broke about Noma in January, Vivian Howard, who had recently closed her flagship North Carolina restaurant Chef & the Farmer, published an essay in the New York Times criticizing Noma and what it represents for aspiring chefs. Citing a report from The Atlantic revealing a Danish restaurant’s dependence on free labor, she called Noma a “work camp” and a stronghold for “extremist fine dining.”

As Howard points out, this is nothing new. Many award-winning chefs have shifted focus or abandoned their flagship fine dining restaurants entirely to launch fast food concepts that they can replicate like amoebas in any random mall or airport terminal from sea to shining sea. Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck are two celebrity chef-turned-international brands that come to mind.

While Noma’s closure affects cuisine halfway around the Bay Area, the trials and tribulations of Michelin’s high standards expose deeper problems in our own hospitality industry. The Standard asked four Bay Area chefs for their opinions on the future of the Michelin model, and there were no easy answers.

Launch pad causing alarm

Last year, restaurateur Hirohiko Sato said he was thrilled to learn that his new nine-seat kappo-style bar in Japantown Yuji, named after chef Yuji Yamauchi, was included in the Michelin guide. Being featured in the Michelin Guide isn’t the same as earning a star, but for many new restaurants, it’s a carrot that the tire company juggles with the vague promise that a more prestigious star may soon emerge later this year.

Yuji never got that star. However, by giving examples such as “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto, Sato hopes that one day he will be able to capture one of them. If this happens, he knows that Yamauchi will become a famous chef and also do wonders for his career.

“Then someday we will open another place either in New York or in Los Angeles. This is our goal,” Sato said.

If Yuuji is a Hollywood Michelin star contender, then Chef David Costa’s Adega is a cautionary tale. Adega is the only restaurant in San Jose with a Michelin star. The upscale Portuguese eatery gained its star in 2016, lost it in 2018, and regained it in 2021. No wonder Costa told The Standard that Michelin is more important than ever to his cuisine.

“This is very important to my entire team at the restaurant and very important to us as a business,” Costa said.

Allegedly, Adega’s star fell after a lackluster anonymous inspection, and Costa said the thought still haunts him. “I have no idea about the visits,” he said. “We do not see a person who conducts checks. It’s good, but it’s bad.”

As a result, Costa said he focused on consistency. “You have a lot of pressure,” he said. “So everything is the same. It’s better for maintaining quality.”

Overrated and insolvent

Jim Stump says he was the first to point out how Michelin undermines the creativity of chefs. The 60-year-old restaurateur owns six locations in South Bay, including contemporary American eatery The Table in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood. In January, he opened a bar of the same name at the San Jose airport.

Having spent most of his life in the kitchen, Stump said he had no interest in chasing a Michelin star. He told The Standard that it takes a certain level of myopia to become a Michelin-starred chef.

“Agenda is a great word,” Stump said. “Michelin is the benchmark for quality. So chefs want that because basically that’s what you get as a chef. At least as a young chef, you don’t get paid.”

Starting as a young chef, Stump says he learned the hard way to develop his own definition of success. “I wanted an award,” Stump said. “I worked in a restaurant where we tried to be the best, but failed. And I learned that hard lesson in business.”

Stump said he also noticed that since each additional Michelin star is harder to get, playing the stars can be addictive. “If you get one, you want two, you want three. After all, if you’re a chef who wants to work in a three-star environment, you’re saying, “I want to be the best in the world,” which means you’re willing to suffer and sacrifice no matter what.”

Since it only takes one negative review from one of the Michelin inspectors, who is rumored to anonymously visit starred restaurants every 18 months or so, chefs must maintain the consistency and even uniformity of their dishes, thus limiting the creative freedom of the chef.

“There is a certain silence on the menu,” Stump said. “You start talking at that level, at some point it gets boring.”

However, Stump said there are Michelin-starred restaurants that manage to balance quality standards with the magic of creating a space where diners can feel like they belong. As an example, he cites Cyrus, the Michelin-starred gem of wine country in Healdsburg, run by chef Douglas Keene.

“You go into his dining room and you feel welcome and warm and it’s like, ‘Wow, this guy has the magic to do it at this level.’

Stump is also candid about the elephant in the room: given the high cost of living in the Bay Area, the Michelin model may be particularly untenable here.

“These last three years have forced all of us to rethink everything,” he said. “Some chefs have left the kitchen in the Bay Area. Living here is just astronomically expensive. […] and Michelin stars don’t pay the bills.”

A worthy and sustainable goal

Harrison Cheney moved to San Francisco, perhaps in part to test this theory. He’s the new chef at Sons & Daughters in Knob Hill. Before taking the job there, Cheney worked at Stockholm’s Michelin-starred restaurant Gastrologik, now permanently closed. Tig Moriarty, longtime chef and owner of Sons & Daughters, enticed Cheney to cross the Atlantic and take the reins at his seasonal 16-seat diner.

Cheney’s culinary ambitions predate puberty. The British chef told The Standard he decided he wanted to be a chef at the age of 9, inspired in part by his mother and the celebrity chefs featured in cooking shows she watched at home. By the age of 17 he was working in a kitchen in the UK when she received her first Michelin star.

As Cheney told The Standard, he still believes that Michelin is and will continue to be the gold standard for fine dining. “With that kind of recognition, you get a lot more bookings and then recognition,” he said. “Michelin reminds us of our goals […] so I certainly think it’s still very relevant.”

Reflecting on all the overtime his team put in at Gastrologik after they set their sights on a second Michelin star, he said the pressure was strong. “It was like someone was watching you over your shoulder, like, ‘Is that enough? It’s enough? and in the end we got a second star, that’s all. It was almost a confirmation that everything we do was a step in the right direction.”

When he first started working in gourmet kitchens, Cheney said he easily worked 19-hour days and slept about three hours at night. Now that he runs his own kitchen, he said it’s about balancing Michelin-worthy standards with a healthy work life.

“First of all, I really believe this can be sustainable,” Cheney said. “But I think it depends on us. These are solutions for people in positions like me.”

While the Michelin model propelled chefs to celebrity status, Cheney said he wants to emphasize that it’s a team effort. “That’s what makes a restaurant a Michelin star, because you leave any of those chefs and everything works differently. You need a very efficient model to keep the Michelin star.”

Before Cheney joined the Sons & Daughters kitchen, his predecessor was a strong advocate for fair working conditions, offering free medical care and sharing profits with his employees. Cheney said he plans to keep those values, although he is realistic about what it takes to work in an award-winning kitchen.

“We still work 11-hour shifts,” he admitted. “But really, I don’t know if there’s a way to stop it. If you want to work in the best restaurants, you have to make sacrifices.

“The most important thing for me is to have a busy restaurant and happy staff,” Cheney added. “With this, I truly believe that the accolades do come.”

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