The long anticipated Michelin Guide for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Napa and Sonoma wine country was released in October 2006. If you are not familiar with the guide, you should know that the Michelin guide (known as the “Red Guide”) is the most authoritative and respected restaurant guide published in France.
Michelin has released its French guide annually for over 100 years. Additionally, it publishes similar guides for most other countries in Europe, and just last year published its first Red Guide for the United States--a guide for New York City. It is expected that Michelin will follow up on its New York City and San Francisco guides by publishing Red Guides for other United States cities, including Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles.
Michelin’s system for reviewing restaurants is both deceptively simple yet extremely complex. If you would like to learn more about the French Michelin guide, and my own introduction to it over twenty years ago, click here. However, for present purposes, if you are not familiar with the guide, you need to know that Michelin awards “stars” to restaurants based primarily on the quality of their cooking. A three-star rating is the highest honor, although two and one star awards are also extremely important. Restaurants not making the one-star rating are also included in the Michelin guide, and are given rankings of “forks & spoons”—with five being the highest ranking in this category. In practice, however, most “fork and spoon” restaurants are in the one or two category, and you can eat quite well in a one fork and spoon restaurant.
Wine Country restaurants did especially well in the San Francisco Michelin Guide. Michelin awarded its highest rating to the French Laundry in Yountville, Napa Valley. This award was not surprising, since the French Laundry has long been regarded as one of the top restaurants in the United States. What was surprising, however, is that the French Laundry was the ONLY restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area to receive the coveted three-star Michelin rating.
To put this in perspective, it should be noted that in all of France this year, Michelin awarded just 28 restaurants a three-star rating. Although the number of French three star restaurants has inched up in recent years, the Michelin inspectors can never be accused of “grade inflation” when it comes to awarding three stars to a restaurant. If Michelin was stingy in its award of the three star ranking in the San Francisco Bay area, the same can be said of its practice in France.