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As a young kid, Michelin three stars, it is something, as a cook,

you don't even try to dream of.

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The Michelin Guides were founded in 1900 by the Michelin brothers,

who were tire manufacturers in Clermont-Ferrand, in Central France.

The purpose of the Michelin Guide was to encourage automobile owners,

of which they were very few, less than 4,000 at the time,

to take their cars out and drive.

Because the Michelin brothers realized that if they were going to sell tires,

people had to drive and use tires up and buy replacements.

Back then, there were no gas stations, there were no repair stations,

there were no roads to speak of.

People had to drive, so the Michelins went and they started putting lights on roads,

putting signposts on roads.

There were no service stations. Where can people buy gasoline?

Where can they get their car fixed? Where can they sleep? Where can they eat?

As the years went by, the people who used the Michelin Guide found

that the recommendations for hotels and restaurants were particularly good.

I think we represent quality, we help mobility, and we help our readers,

and our mobile drivers find great places to eat and great places to sleep.

The Michelin Guides now,

after our 115 years in France, we've expanded to 23 different countries around the world.

I think the Michelin Guides have really become the reference,

the barometer, to fine dining around the world.

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I think when you get in the two to three-star level, you're looking for more real emotion,

you're looking for the 'wow' factor. Certainly because three-star level,

you're looking at something that is absolutely unique.

All the three-star chefs around the world have something unique in their signature.

They're able to express something that no one else can,

and I think it's really has got to be a memorable meal.

I think one of the hallmarks of a three-star restaurant is something that you say,

when you get up, you say, "Wow, that was a real experience.

I've never had something like that."

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The Michelin Guide started as a book for traveler to find restaurants in remote locations.

That was, of course, before the Internet, TripAdvisor, food blogging,

and all the other information sources you have now readily available.

This is exactly how I started to use the [?] because I started to travel in the early '80s.

There are currently 119 three-star places. At this point, I've been to 113.

Cooking is applied chemistry because you use heat or cold to change

what you have, the ingredients, to make something, hopefully, better.

In the hands of a skilled chef, which takes, applies this chemistry,

but adds creativity and craftsmanship, it becomes art.

Art on your plate.

A fleeting art because it disappears, hopefully, when you eat it,

and this art becomes pleasure. Pure pleasure.

The good thing about it, it's repeatable. You can go and have the same or better,

or different pleasures, and that what makes eating [?] great.

The criteria that we use to award the Michelin star have always been the same.

We look at the harmony, the mastery of cooking technique, and the harmony of the flavors,

we look at consistency throughout the menu, and consistency over time.

We look for the chefs personality as expressed in the plate, and we look for value for money.

Those tried and true criteria have always been the bases for the Michelin ratings.

The first thing that the Michelin inspectors look for is the quality of the raw ingredients.

Raw material is the cornerstone of fine cooking.

The second is the mastery of cooking technique.

When a chef is cooking something, it's got to be perfectly cooked.

For example, fish probably have about a 30-second window,

when the fish is perfectly cooked.

The third thing they're looking for is equilibrium and harmony in the flavors.

The food has to be balanced.

It has to be in perfect harmony.

We're also looking for the chef's personality, his signature.

Is he able to express himself in what he does?

Then we look for regularity. It's very important for a chef in a restaurant

to be able to produce the same level of quality whether it's in February,

July, or November.

Even though the visual presentation is not a criteria for the Michelin inspectors,

it's very much part of the experience and, certainly, I think chef's today

are very much in tuned to wanting to present a visual experience,

as well as a gustatory experience.

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San Sebastian is a special place for me.

I went to culinary school there for a little while, and got to know the area very well.

I can say it's probably the greatest concentration of culinary awesomeness in all of Europe.

Part of that comes from the fact that the Basques fundamentally believe

it's a human right for them to eat as well as absolutely possible at all hours of the day.

That starts with ingredients. They have an absolute ingredient obsession.

Finding the best wild mushrooms,

the very best seafood from the Atlantic coast of Spain.

I'm talking about people who are willing to spend an extraordinary

percentage of their money on eating.

They spend more than any other region in Spain,

and that extends from the pintxos bars, down to the regular everyday level,

all the way up to the Michelin-starred temples that make this one

of the most Michelin-dense communities in the world.

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Right now, we're in the closing period of Mugaritz.

Technically, we only open to the public from April to December.

We only open for nine months.

Between January and mid April, the people in the Research and Development Team,

and the two head chefs, they come to work, and we collaborate together to create

between 60 to 65 dishes.

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We wish to create an experience for a guest or guests that requires them

to be a little bit more awake, and a little bit more present in the table.

Wow.

Andoni will try between 28 to 30 dishes.

He will sit down, and he likes to say that he thinks like a guest.

He will see if it's interesting enough, if it's something that provokes him,

if it's something that might awake an emotion.

We're not just doing food, and we're not just serving a meal.

We don't even like to call ourself a restaurant.

We like to say that we're enhancers of an experience.

We give you the tools, and you are the creators of your experience.

Mugaritz is one of my absolute favorite places in the world to go and eat.

I have been there at least 25 times. I go there at least twice a year,

and I go back to San Sebastian in January of 2017, but unfortunately,

Andoni-- Mugaritz will be closed during this period because they are shutdown

to create a new menu, which they will launch in the middle of April.

Sometimes, I have to say of this 20 plus meals, sometimes it doesn't work out.

Sometimes you have 20 servings and sometimes there are too many servings

which are so experimental, that they don't connect with you,

but it will not prevent me, ever, from going back there.

It's absolute must.

He is one of the, maybe even the most, experimental chef.

[bell tolling]

For me, there's three restaurants in particular that, on a personal level,

that I feel like Michelin has gotten it entirely wrong.

It becomes a confounding case of, do these guys really--

Are they really paying attention?

Those cases are Mugaritz, Noma, and Disfrutar, in Barcelona.

In each case, they're a sort of experimental cuisine.

They're very different restaurants, but they're wildly creative.

They fly in the face of traditional refined haute cuisine.

When you have an experience there, at Mugaritz or at Noma,

nothing could be improved upon in terms of the service, in terms of the environment,

in terms of the complete experience. It is entirely complete.

To think that they have two stars, I think most people around the world scratch

their head thinking, "What's missing?

What's the problem here?"

When I first went to Copenhagen, I went because everyone else went.

I went for the Noma pilgrimage. That was 2012.

I was a little concerned at that time because it felt like the other restaurants around Noma

were trying to imitate that language.

It felt like it was in danger of being a one trick pony,

New Nordic or whatever you want to call it. In the last five years,

it's been amazing to watch as people who have come to the Noma system,

have branched out and opened up their own worlds and developed their own language.

Yes, they're playing with some similar ingredients, but doing it in incredibly exciting ways.

Today, you have places like AOC, and Geranium,

or all the restaurants from Christian Puglisi and Studio doing truly remarkable cuisine.

They've taken a moment.

They've taken the global attention that Noma brought to the city,

and transformed it into an entire diverse food culture,

which is nothing short of miraculous, I think.

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[background conversation]

-Standing by for audit. -Yes, sir.

Stop fucking talking and plate those fucking [?], guys.

-Yes? -Yes, sir.

[background conversation]

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All of our inspectors are food professionals, they're gastronomy professionals,

they eat anonymously when they go to a restaurant,

and they always pay their bill.

I think the idea of being a Michelin inspector is very attractive.

The reality is much more rigorous.

You really have to be focused and obsessed with it.

It's tight stuff. I go-- I can't do it.

I can't eat-- I have a hard time eating two full meals a day.

It's like, "Phew." It's a struggle.

We bring Japanese folks to Europe, we send Europeans to Japan, to China.

The Europeans come to the US. The US comes to Asia.

They're all over the place, and they love it.

That's what inspectors-- That's their dream job.

If I ask an inspector, "Who wants to go to Singapore for a week?"

Everyone volunteers.

We get together several times over the year, to do what we call a star session.

In that session, all the inspectors are together with me and the head inspector

for the country.

We look at all the different papers, all of the different table trials.

At that point, we start reflecting on where we're going to give, maintain,

or take away a star, if necessary.

It's a little embarrassing to only have one, especially when we had two.

To be brutally honest, I never imagined I would have any stars, as a young chef.

I never felt that we deserved two when we had two.

When we lost one, we removed 25 tables, which is a lot.

That was in, I think, 2008.

I think that we've continued to improve since then.

In the conversations I've had with Michelin, they've made it clear to me

that they don't think that we use quality enough product,

and that our food is not consistent enough with their standards.

That's a brutally honest thing to hear, but it's also constructive.

I really appreciate that.

It's something that we talk about a lot, and something that we continue to try to work on.

I don't necessarily have to agree with it, but that's beside the point.

It gives us something to strive for,

and--

I don’t know, we'll see.

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Michelin is like an ex-boyfriend who would never want to see you again.

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The truth is, I don't know enough about the inspectors,

their travels and how they go about doing this.

It certainly would help a lot to get a perspective, but I think, in general,

the idea of trying to compare a restaurant experience in Japan

with a restaurant experience in Europe, you're talking about two entirely different worlds,

and you're trying to paint them with these broad brushes,

with these stars.

It's impossible to compare a six seat soba restaurant in Tokyo,

where the only thing the chef does is grind buckwheat and kneed it into noodles,

with a place like Disfrutar in Barcelona, where you have a team of 30 chefs

working their way through 30 or 40 different courses of the utmost complexity.

How are those even comparable?

It's like apples and zucchini, it's absurd.

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As a kid, I would draw the skyscrapers, and I would draw myself next to them.

It's funny that I ended up in New York where all the skyscrapers are,

and at that point, I don't even know why I drew skyscrapers.

We're on 24th Street, in Madison Avenue.

We're really in the heart of Manhattan.

In fact, this building was supposed to become the tallest building in the world.

That's why we ended up with this amazing room here.

In the great depression, they ran out of money.

The build was halted and the building now is only like 30 stories high,

but the structure, it's an entire city block and the grandeur of this room

was meant to be the lobby for the tallest building in the world.

It's pretty special.

My mom taught me how to cook, how to eat, how to buy ingredients.

For a while, Michelin three star restaurants were very intimidating,

and that's not cool. When you go to a restaurant, that is the opposite.

You want to be welcome, you want to feel comfortable,

you want to-- Sometimes I looked at the menu outside,

and I tried to look inside, and I was scared even to look inside.

[laughs]

My dad is an architect, and I always grew up with an eye for architecture,

for art, for fashion, for beautiful objects, that was always something important.

11 years ago, we got a review by the New York Observer.

I think it was too positive for where we were at that time.

It said, "I wish this place would have a little bit more Miles Davis."

That was kind of cool to hear, but we didn't know exactly what that meant.

We started researching Miles, we started listening to Miles,

and we knew he was amazing, but oh my God.

When we started really digging into it, that guy was a genius.

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We're very fascinated by him, and we came up with a list of 11 words.

They were commonly used to describe him.

We look at the list of words, we're like, "Oh my God, this is what we needed."

These words are hanging in the kitchen today.

These words have been our mission statement for over 11 years.

Every year there's been change, there's been so much change,

and it's kind of like Miles' career,

there's been so many different iterations of Miles. I think when you look at 11 Madison Park,

it's very similar to that.

It's an ongoing effort, it's not something you decide and then you are.

It's something you need to challenge yourself always to collaborate.

Miles has always been there to guide us, and it's been really helpful.

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I love minimalism.

It's so much more powerful at times not to put something there, than to put it there.

I think it's really fascinating.

I love the evolutions of artists, and almost for everyone,

as they advance in their careers, everyone becomes more simple,

more restrained. I think as a chef, I always try to emulate that.

Less is more.

I love what I do so much that I really get up with joy.

Sometimes I'm in the elevator in my building,

and I see all the guys in the suits going to work,

and they look like just miserable.

I'm like, "I feel so lucky that I get to go to the kitchen and work with food,

and work with people I love, and create."

I have found myself. I know who I am.

I know what our cuisine is, and I think that's really, really a beautiful moment.

I feel that we are just at the beginning.

This is the very beginning, but now we know who we are.

Before, we didn't.

I live in New York for a long time, and got to know the food scene

there very intimately.

What I love about New York is the breath of the cuisine.

The fact that there really are no rules.

The US has the advantage of not having really defined traditional cuisine.

Of course, there are pockets of it everywhere, but New York is sort of a reflection

of that melting pot nature that Americans embrace.

That means that you're not only going to find incredible Sichuan food,

or incredible Korean food, or incredible food from Oaxaca, Mexico,

but you're also going to find a meshing of cultures that express itself

in the modern dinning scene in really exciting ways.

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6:30, table nine.

Three guests. He's dinning with his parents.

He's been here before. He's been here twice.

Sat at table nine once.

He likes to drink wine.

What happens in my head, tasting flavors, it's just fireworks in my head.

Aska is a restaurant located in Brooklyn.

A restaurant where we tried to bridge the immediate surroundings,

Upstate New York with sort of our heritage or the tradition of having grown up

in Scandinavia and Sweden. Everything should make sense.

From the moment the guest walks in the door and the food is served,

the staff on board, uniformed, the food that we cook,

where we are in Brooklyn, where we are in New York, in the world.

Our connection to Scandinavia.

Where it should make sense. Everything has a meaning.

We want you to be able to take a moment and step away from your everyday life.

We want you to walk in through these doors and just forget

what's going on around you.

Sit here and hopefully, go on a little journey.

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Well, if I were to tell you everything that is of dark and hidden under the surfaces

of Michelin Starred restaurants or just brands, high-end dining around the world,

we would never leave this room.

There's a reason that we all go out to these restaurants.

They let us escape from our everyday lives. There's a perfection at play.

There's this-- a whimsical nature.

There's something that we can't achieve in our own home kitchens,

and so we go out to these places, but the work that it takes to get there,

really, takes a toll on people who are both cooking it and serving it to you.

It's coming at the cost of people's well-being and lives.

It's a lot.It's a lot and it's constant, and it is everywhere from greasy spoon diners

to really exacerbated and Michelin Starred restaurants,

for a number of reasons.

In the month of February of 2016 alone,

I know of three different chef-owners committing suicide.

That is the shortest month of the year, and those are ones that I happen to know about.

Ones that were publicized.

I will tell you anecdotally because now that I write about this,

in this particular way, people write to me all the time and say,

"You may not know, but this sous-chef from this little restaurant took his own life.

This particular person has drunk themselves to death.

My partner who is a chef is in severe crisis."

Somebody told me, wrote to me and said,

"I had to lie to my girlfriend about where these bruises came from.

I kept telling her I ran into things. I didn't want to tell her my chef hits me."

Because of the hours that go into this, it becomes a cycle and people go on

and on and on, until they just can't anymore, and it's part of kitchen culture.

You man up.

You go and go and go.

You don't be a pussy.

You just go until you drop.

You say, "Way chef" until those are your last words.

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Mr. Narisawa's cuisine, it is extremely simple, yet very hard for people to understand.

His technique isn't shown on the plate,

his techniques are shown on [?] in a very, very intricate way.

He's one of the chefs that can embrace Japan in a different way,

not just protecting the farmers, not just protecting the fishermen,

but the spirit of the way how Japanese people lived,

but you have to be able to appreciate how he does it,

to get to that dish. His background is completely French cuisine.

There are no other persons in Japan who can cook a better French cuisine as he does,

but he drew away from that.

He doesn't really put on an emphasis on the fact that whether he is Japanese,

whether he is doing French cuisine or Chinese cuisine.

He's just using all these techniques, and you won't find any other chefs

around the world who can actually utilize that so easily like a musician.

I will be totally unoriginal and say that if I had one place to eat for the rest of my life,

it would be Tokyo.

I think a lot of chefs will tell you the same thing,

especially if they've experienced the wonder of this city.

For me, Tokyo and Japan is really about specialization.

This idea of shokunin, of a dedicated craftsperson or an artisan who takes

a very narrow discipline, and dedicates an entire life

to the perfection of that discipline.

In the cooking world, that means that you don't open a restaurant that does Sushi

and Tempura and Yakitori in one place as you find here in the Western world.

You find a single chef, a long line of generations of chefs from a single family,

dedicated to one tiny discipline.

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There are currently 119 three-star places and 375 two-star places.

At this point, I've been to 113 and we've seen three in Japan.

In Seoul and Shanghai, another three, but now finally I think I have it, in April,

I have an opportunity to go to these places which are missing.

Hopefully, by April I have completed the whole 119 restaurants,

unless The Guide, the Guide Michelin decides to publish new books

and add countries and three-star places to that.

We're launching several new guides this year.

As I said, the second edition of the Rio São Paulo, we're launching Singapore in July.

I've got some more press conferences to go to where we'll be announcing new destinations.

So we are going to have a huge year for new destinations, a record year in 2016.

We've got our eyes open, our ears open and our boots on the ground.

We're looking around for different things but we're ultimately,

The Guide, we're there to reflect great food, but we're also there to create value

for the Michelin brand and create preference to the Michelin brand.

We will go wherever we find great food and the interest of the group,

The Michelin Guide will follow.

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Good morning.

This is Michael Ellis with The Michelin Guide calling.

I was wondering if Mr. Wassim Hallal was present?

-Wassim.

-Yes.

Well, I'm calling from Stockholm, where we're going to be launching

The Nordic Cities Guide 2015 and I just wanted to let chef Wassim Hallal

and the staff know that he has been awarded a Michelin star.

I wanted to call and congratulate everybody.

Yes.

[foreign language] [applause]

This is the fun part of the job.

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