MICHELIN MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO Director Jean-Luc Naret talks with Terrance Gelenter

The recent publication of the long anticipated Michelin Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area  & Wine Country was greeted with a torrent of publicity including back-to-back front page coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. Not all of it good-but there is no such thing as bad publicity.

In a city that prides itself on being in the vanguard of a culinary revolution launched by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in the early seventies shock waves rippled through town when only one restaurant of the 356 included in the guide, The French Laundry earned the coveted 3-star rating and only 28 earned any stars –out of 1,000 visited restaurants.

Michelin director Jean-Luc Naret flew in from Paris for the launch and I grabbed him for a brief chat prior to a panel discussion and book signing with key San Francisco food writers at the Williams-Sonoma flagship store at San Francisco’s Union Square.

TG: What are the general criteria used to evaluate a restaurant and how many visits do your inspectors make before making a determination?

J-LN: The selections for the Guide Michelin are made by anonymous inspectors who are full-time employees and work exclusively for us. A typical Michelin inspector will do 130 room nights at hotels per year where he will stay overnight under an assumed name, experience everything the hotel has to offer and pay his bill in the morning. He will do about 800 visits of hotels and restaurants where they announce themselves and ask for a tour to see the back of the house and about 240 lunch and dinners anonymously.

We don’t sleep in each hotel every year because they don’t usually change that much but every restaurant is visited by an inspector at least once every two years and the starred and Michelin award-wining restaurants are visited many times every year.

TG: By the same inspector?
J-LN: No, by various inspectors. Since the inspectors are assigned different regions every year we make sure that an inspector doesn’t go back to a restaurant within three years.

TG: How do you select inspectors?
J-LN: We are first and foremost looking for people who are passionate about food. They need to have an eye for detail; to be able to see things that others wouldn’t. Then we train them for six months taking them around Europe and making sure they understand the criteria we are looking for. Then they are followed around for six months until we are satisfied that we trust their judgment.

TG: Now that you’ve entered the American market with New York and now San Francisco do you hire inspectors from New York or French nationals?

J-LN: When we came to NY I personally selected a team of Europeans and then we started to recruit people locally whom we sent to Europe for training. Our inspector for the second New York edition is from New York. It was the same in San Francisco but because we were already here in the United States we were able to add Californians to our team.

TG: How has the internet affected your business?
J-LN: Dramatic as it has been for all print media. We are probably down 15% per year in sales of the guide but we are still the biggest seller of guides in the world. Last year we sold I million in all languages. Yet, at the same time we have never been more visible through www.michelin.com free of charge in six languages.

TG: How has the look of the guide changed to appeal to a younger audience?
J-LN: The Michelin guide has been evolving throughout the years. We started with a picturegram showing electricity in the hotel rooms and now we are showing Wi-Fi. If you look at the New York and San Francisco guides you will see that the graphic atmosphere has changed completely and we are now applying that to Europe. We have our new Paris and London City Guides. You will definitely see more changes.

TG: Where do you see Guide Michelin ten years from now?
J-LN: It took us 106 years to cross the Atlantic-it won’t take us that long to cover the rest of the world. We have a very strong presence in Europe. We will definitely build a strong presence in the United States and will approach Asia in the same spirit starting with  Tokyo and Shanghai. We have free-standing Michelin store in Paris at L’Opéra and in partnership with Open Table you can reserve a table at a restaurant. So there are so many great things in the future.

•The guide is the perfect holiday gift for francophiles and foodies
• Michelin offers customizable copies of the guide for corporate gifting