Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks in our gastronomic sphere.

First was the release of the 2022 Michelin guide. Besides my usual little chuckle at the food writers who throughout the year will drop Michelin into their reviews to add a bit of gravitas, but then cry foul when the stars do not align with their predictions, I normally couldn’t care too much about the release of the revered guide, but I was delighted to see Liath get recognized for the consistent improvement it continues to show – it is a more accomplished restaurant than it was when it was Heron & Gray, and it was pretty good then. 

A couple of days after the Michelin stars were announced, we were boarding a flight to Copenhagen. The build-up to this jaunt was fraught with anxiety. First is that modern-day, lingering background worry that one of the four of us will get covid and be unable to travel. Then there was the looming Storm Eunice which was threatening all week to hit hardest at the time we were due to take-off. But, we got there, a bit late for our dinner reservation in Kodyens Fiskebar, which turned out to be terrible.

Our primary reason for travelling to Copenhagen was for a meal in Noma. We ate in Noma three times previously, the last being in 2015, and it is where we had the two best gastronomic experiences of our lives. Since then, Noma has moved home and changed their approach. Now they are hyper-focused on the season, even more so than they were before, and change their menu three times a year to reflect the best the climate has to offer. In Summer, they focus solely on vegetation, and you will get no seafood or meat. In the autumn the menu is everything from the forest, such as game and mushrooms. And winter and spring, the season we went for, is strictly based around the ocean, when the cold water brings out the best of it.

We were a bit apprehensive going back. Could this approach match the experiences we had before, with so many of the dishes still etched in our brain and still, to this day, a regular talking point around our kitchen table? Would we miss the diversity of having different seasonal offerings, instead of just a whole menu focused on one genre? What if it just didn’t live up to our, probably untenable, expectations that the restaurant themselves set for us previously?

Noma has won the World’s Best Restaurant Award five times now, more than any other restaurant, including as recently as October, so surely it must be as good as ever, right? Maybe, just maybe, it’s even better. Can there really be such thing as the best restaurant in the world? It seems puerile to grant a title of “best” to anything that is so subjective and down to individual experiences and tastes. Notice above, we said we had the best experiences of our lives in Noma, we are not saying that they are the best restaurant in the world. I am always wary of any critic who tells you that a certain restaurant is “the best” in the world, a country or even a city. What they probably mean, if they are not just trying to seduce us with an attention-grabbing headline, is they had their best experience in this restaurant. Also, to declare anything as the “best” would require that the critic has recently ate in all other restaurants that may be vying for that title.

The World’s Best 50 Awards, for all its silliness, does draw attention to the industry and, at times, can recognize a chef and restaurant who are pushing the envelope and give that restaurant the opportunity to push it forward even more. Without the World’s Best 50, restaurants like Noma, and previously elBulli, would not have had the same influence on the culinary world as they went on to have.

Noma was not the first restaurant to diligently focus on the season and the provenance of the local landscape, but because of their success, and, it must be said their brilliance, they have had a profound influence, not just on many chefs and restaurants around the world, who started to centre their food more around their immediate environment and local food producers, but also on what we eat at home. In recent years there has been a greater push by supermarkets to source local ingredients and support local, small, farm producers. This, in part, is down to the influence that Noma has had.

There are many examples in history of a chef that has had a major influence on the food offerings in restaurants worldwide (Careme, Escoffier, Bocuse, Bras, Keller, Adria, Waters to name a few) and Noma’s Rene Redzepi has possibly had as big an influence as any in modern times. Even in Ireland, many of our most lauded restaurants are influenced by what has been named as the New Nordic food movement, which Redzepi unknowingly started when he setup Noma.

Just like after elBulli’s success some years earlier, some chefs, eager to jump on to a trend, created perverse manifestations of this New Nordic philosophy. While after elBulli’s rise to fame, some ill-guided chefs started to put foams, airs, spherification on every dish, since Noma there are chefs putting flowers and grass from their local vicinity on everything that left their kitchen, sometimes to laughable effect.

But, the New Nordic wave, even when misinterpreted, has strengthened relationships between the chef and the farmer, has made us look around our own neighbourhood for what is delicious and, consequently, has reduced food miles. This, overall, must be a good thing.
Possibly the biggest impact Noma has had has been on the Nordic region. This region, whilst having traditional food, had no compelling food culture like the French, Spanish or Italians. Noma changed that and the Nordic region, with the identity of provenance and food that represents the season always being at the fore, is now a world-class culinary food destination. This is thanks, in no small part, to the Noma alumni who have gone on to open some formidable restaurants of their own.

So, what of Noma in 2022? Could it match our experience of seven years previous? Would it be worth the high price tag (and a meal in Noma comes with a feckin’ eye-watering price tag)? In a word: Yes. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Noma 2.0 felt like a different restaurant than Noma 1.0 and it was different in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dishes in Noma 1.0 focused on an earthy feeling, with dishes having their subtlety shine through with brilliant use of acidity. This may sound abstract, but the food managed to taste like a reflection of the season, of the time and place. Many of the Ocean dishes on our Noma 2.0 tasting menu were bolder and they were accentuated with spice and heat that played no part in Noma 1.0. I suspect this change came out of Noma’s popups in Australia, Japan and Mexico. This spice and heat were deftly and expertly used, and it had the effect of bringing out the best of the seafood component on the dish.

When we visited Noma in 2014 and 2015 there were many dishes that blew us away. These are the sort of dishes that you don’t talk about at the time, but instead they would throw you into a savouring silence and only a glance at each other is needed to know we are both engrossed in something we will never forget. These are not only 10 out of 10 dishes, but 11 out of 10 as they have that factor of being immortal in our memory. On this same menu, there were some dishes that were excellent, but I would probably only give them 8 or 9 out of 10.
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On our 2022 Ocean menu, while there may have been less of those silence-inducing 11 out of 10s, there was no dish that would get less than 9 and giving any dish a 9 would be harsh. The consistent brilliance across the whole menu was astounding.

Each dish is based around a piece of fish or shellfish. A blue mussel filled with a quail egg was complexity masquerading as delectable simplicity. I have never had squid as good as that was cooked with koji spores, simply amazing. I could go on, but I reckon you get the impression by now that the food was bloody great. But allow me to just mention the one dish that may have been the most astonishing:  a dessert made with oyster – yes you read that correctly. The taste of oyster came across stronger than you expect, but with the addition of quince amazake to balance it out into the perfect dessert, which in the wrong hands could be a calamity. We were left speechless and shaking our heads at the awesomeness of this dish.

In Noma 2.0, Redzepi has managed to add extra layers to the food, still managing to represent the Nordic season, while focusing each dish on one superbly sourced ocean offering. The components in each dish complement each other, but are still identifiable in their own right and there is a minimalist restraint with each dish, with ingredients only added if really needed.

The wine pairings were perfectly matched, with a lot of natural wine and the occasional skin contact wine thrown in. They were generous with the vino too, constantly topping up our glasses.

The service this time around had slightly changed from Noma 1.0. Previously each dish would be presented to the diner with a detailed story of its development and makeup. Now, the dish is served with a brief outline of what is on the plate and you are left to your own devices to eat as you wish. Either way, we always found the service in Noma faultless, and this time was no exception.
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Best Restaurant in The World? Who Knows? Who Cares? All I know is that Noma is our favourite restaurant in the world, and we are already planning when we can get back for the summer and autumn menus.

A couple of years ago we enjoyed an excellent meal in Matthew Orlando's restaurant Amass in Copenhagen. Our lunch was superior than most meals we have enjoyed in the last few years. The seasonal food was prepared with skill, the flavours clear and coherent, the combinations clever, and most impressively of all; the memories lasting. The food was so marvellous that during the meal we asked our server could we upgrade our tasting menu in order to increase the number of courses, even though, after a few days in Copenhagen, our bank balance was rapidly approaching the red. Amass didn't and still doesn't hold a Michelin star.

Last year we had lunch in Alain Ducasse at the beautiful Dorchester Hotel in London. The food was uninspiring; three dull, badly prepared dishes in a meal that was only saved by good wines and splendid cheese. A disappointment then, especially since we enjoyed a superb lunch there a couple of years previous. Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester has 3 Michelin stars.

When we review meals we never mention Michelin. The reason for this is simple; our reviews are of our experiences; Michelin's are of theirs. When we reviewed Amass we didn't complain that it hadn't been awarded a star yet, nor did we suggest it should have one and we certainly didn't predict it would be awarded one in the next publication of the guide. Similarly, anytime we reviewed a meal of a starred restaurant that we were less than enamoured with, we wouldn't complain that it had a star or rant about how Michelin got it wrong. We have given glowing reviews to non-starred restaurants and terrible verdicts on the starred.

Next month the 2017 red guide will be published – this year, for the first time, released with a ceremony in London; maybe an attempt by Michelin to keep up with the marketing hype of the Worlds’ Best Restaurant unveiling held every spring. The announcement of the Michelin guide will almost certainly be met with the same sour grapes, tantrums, conspiracy theories and irrational, pedantic claptrap from some food critics. These pundits seem to deem it just downright unthinkable that there aren't more starred restaurants gracing our small island. It is unfathomable to them that the restaurants they have given glowing reviews to haven't been awarded their supposedly deserved and, often, predicted star.

But is there anything behind these criticisms or is it just hogwash and conjecture? Maybe it is right to add a little bit of perspective and balance to these inevitable criticisms. This is not done to either praise or defend Michelin, but more to just highlight why some of these criticisms might not ring true with logic and evidence.

When the Scandinavian guide was released earlier this year and Amass was still not awarded a star, we might have been the tiniest bit surprised, but we didn’t complain that Michelin had dropped the ball, nor did we think we were wrong for praising the restaurant so highly. We can speak only for the meal that was served to us on that one Saturday afternoon the November before last. How on earth could we know what experience the Michelin inspector had when they visited? Well, obviously we can’t, no one can. For all we know the inspector was served an over-seasoned steaming turd in a urine consommé. Similarly, it is also not inconceivable that a restaurant that was a disappointment for us, like Ducasse in London was last year, might have served up a much more pleasing experience to others.

In the last few years in Dublin there was one decision that Michelin made that really vexed the some of the Irish food critics: not awarding a star to The GreenHouse until last year. To many of our esteemed professional gourmands The GreenHouse has been, since the day it opened, the pinnacle of the Dublin restaurant scene and it was just downright “breath-taking” that Michelin didn’t agree with them. Apparently, Michelin was slow to pick up on this great restaurant and when realising their mistake, they didn’t want to lose face by awarding the star the following year and so waited for a few more guides before finally making amends for the error of their ways.

Ignoring the fact that The GreenHouse did seem to change their culinary style in the year preceding the award of their star, the obviously foolish complaint here is that “I think the restaurant is great and gave it a glowing review, so I am outraged that Michelin doesn’t agree”. Unless you were at the table with the Michelin Inspector, on each occasion that he or she visited, which probably wasn’t on opening night, and personally sampled all of their dishes then you really have no right to comment on whether Michelin came to the right or wrong decision. If a friend ate out at a restaurant you loved and was to tell you, for example, that the beef was overcooked and the cod under-seasoned, would you tell them they were wrong? Would you say, “no it wasn’t because I ate there and everything was perfect”? You probably wouldn’t, and certainly shouldn’t.

One of the reasons spouted for the oversight of Michelin not to award more stars in Ireland is that their inspectors don’t spend enough time here and when they bother make the trip over they only concentrate on certain areas. Hasn't it even been claimed, without any supporting evidence, that Chapter One would have earned their star earlier if it had been on the south side of the Liffey. Is the charge here that the inspectors couldn't be bothered traipsing the one mile across our expansive city or that they didn't like the image of the north-side. Imagine the meeting at Michelin HQ where it was decided “The food in Chapter One deserves a star, but we can’t have our readers suffering the indignity of Dublin’s north-side”. But, joking aside, is there any indication that Michelin doesn’t pay enough attention to Ireland? Probably not. There are more Michelin stars outside Dublin than in, and bib gourmands have been awarded to places in the most obscure parts of the country over the last few years. Michelin’s Twitter followers will see that they have shown up all over the place in Ireland this year. So as feckin’ hilarious as the jokes about Michelin not putting their tyres to good use in Ireland are, there doesn’t seem to be a reason to think this holds water.

Taking Thornton’s star away last year was met with incredulity from many in the press – as if it was bloody audacious of Michelin to take a star off a chef who has held one for so long, suggesting they have some sort of sinister motive for taking this action. Maybe it would be wise to stop and think for a minute that maybe, just maybe, the food just wasn’t up to scratch when the Michelin inspector visited and that is the only reason that Michelin took this decision. Many people complaining about this probably haven’t eaten in Thornton’s, a restaurant that managed to delight and disappoint us in the last couple of years, since 2005.

Michelin prefers a very high server-to-diner ratio, white tablecloths, formal attire, stiff sommeliers and other classical French formalities. That is the opinion of many at least, but again it is worth looking for the evidence. There are a very many 3-star restaurants around the world that don’t have stiff white tablecloths. Some prominent 3-star restaurants come to mind instantly; Troisgrois in Roanne, Saison in San Francisco, Chef’s table at Brooklyn Fare in New York has counter service. Tom Kerridge’s 2-star pub The Hand & Flowers might have quite superb food, but the service and dining room are far removed from the old-fashioned image of fine dining that many think Michelin still prefer. The same would be said for April Bloomfield’s The Spotted Pig in Manhattan – another pub-style joint where the most popular dish is a burger.

Michelin is a French guide, with their roots in formal French fine dining and all the bells and whistles that come with it, but good food comes in many packages these days, from the classical to the contemporary, from the formal to the easy-going and there has been an obvious effort to stay current in recent years. Barafina, a reservation-free, counter service, tapas bar in London was awarded a star in 2014. For just a few euro, and after ticking boxes on a form-based menu, you can enjoy dumplings in the 1-star Tim Ho Wan, a rudimentary dim sum joint in Hong Kong.

Two years back we jumped into a cab outside our hotel in Singapore and asked the driver to take us to a hawker centre in Chinatown. He took us to the Chinatown Complex on Smith Street. We went inside, upstairs to the food court and joined the longest queue. The very, very long line of people was for a stall called Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice & Noodle. For hardly any money at all we enjoyed three delicious dishes; a dumpling soup, char siew noodle and chicken rice. This tiny stall was awarded a Michelin star in the first Singapore publication of the guide this year.

Dress codes are thankfully a thing of the past for many restaurants now. We have even been sat in 2 and 3-star restaurants, great places such as Arzak, Noma, Cellar de Can Roca, and seen fellow diners in runners, and even the odd tracksuit. Even in Paris, places like the tremendous 1-star Le Chateaubriand is as informal a dining room as you can get.

So maybe there isn’t much truth to this common perception of Michelin being an antiquated guide. Or maybe there is, but it is something that Michelin are making strides to address.

If some of the Irish restaurants that have been overlooked by Michelin were in France they would have been awarded the star they so richly deserved. This is an accusation that has been bandied around by our friends in the media many times. What they are saying is that Michelin gives preferential treatment to French restaurants. That it is somehow easier to get a Michelin star if your restaurant was in Paris, or Lyon, or Marseille, than it would be Dublin. Whilst it is a fact that there are currently only 4 Michelin starred establishments in Dublin, compared to 100 in Paris, that has to be taken in the context of the two cities. There are approximately 2000 restaurants in Dublin, compared to around 14000 in Paris but pertinently, and let’s be fair here, Paris has a much richer and deeper food heritage and culture than our fair city. Marseille a city with around the same number of restaurants as Dublin has only 7 restaurants with a Michelin star. Lyon, the gastronomy obsessed belly of France, has only 18 eateries with coveted stars out of nearly 3000 restaurants, whereas Galway, with less than 400 restaurants, has a higher percentage with 2 Michelin starred restaurants. There are twice as many starred restaurants in Tokyo than in Paris, so the Japanese probably don’t feel too hard done by.

You may hear people say that a meal in a shunned Irish restaurant was better than a meal in a Michelin star restaurant in France. That might well be the case, but are they really saying that there aren’t restaurants in France who they would deem to be overlooked by Michelin too? Are they saying they have never had a bad meal in a Michelin starred restaurant in Ireland? We have certainly had some great meals in starless establishments in France.

Maybe Michelin does have a soft-spot for the old world classical French chefs. Some, like Paul Bocuse, have had 3 Michelin stars for half a century without changing the menu for twenty years. When Alan Ducasse at the Dorchester was awarded 3-stars, just two years after opening, it was met with scepticism by many chefs in London, who didn’t feel it was deserved. However, in last year’s guide, they did take the third star off Le Relais Bernard Loiseau, Alan Ducaisse’s Le Meurice in Paris and L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon went from 2 to 1-star. So who really knows if they are kinder to the French culinary establishment?

There are a couple of the more vocal critics of the Michelin Guide in Ireland who, before complaining that their favourite restaurants haven’t been awarded a star, might do well to ask themselves if it is plausible that the Michelin inspectors might possess more knowledge or expertise than themselves. If you find yourself disagreeing with Michelin’s decision on many restaurants they include or omit, then maybe, as crazy as it might sound, they actually might be the ones who are more informed. After all the inspectors are, apparently, well trained, experienced and are required to eat out around the world regularly.

If Michelin inspectors aren’t a better judge of a meal, then maybe they have a better process of judging a restaurant than the average tabloid critic. It is possible there is something in the anonymous inspector, who isn’t known to everyone in the restaurant, who goes back to check for consistency, maybe they might just have a better angle on the restaurant’s true performance? This method is certainly at odds with the critic writing in your Sunday supplement who will review a restaurant once, usual very soon after it opens, but will never issue a reassessment, even though the restaurant may have changed head chef or their style. These reviews become irrelevant very quickly.

Some of the criticism Michelin attracts is brought on by their, seemingly deliberate, lack of transparency of their methods. How often they actually visit a restaurant? Apparently before the awarding or a new or additional star they will do several visits, but after that they might visit less often, but this is just rumour. Are there certain criteria for the awarding of a star or a bib gourmand? Maybe if they were a bit more open about their processes and the reason for awarding or taking away a star, they might not open themselves up for so much ridicule. 

So, in the era of social media, real-time reviewing, critics, bloggers and blaggers why is a guide by a French tyre company still so relevant? Some chefs certainly pay it far too much respect. It can be cringeworthily frustrating when a talented chef is cooking with the sole aim of winning a Michelin star, usually resulting in food that is an over-engineered, derivative collection of soulless dishes. Michelin claims that they don’t like to see this and prefer a chef cooking with their own identity. It is paid too much attention to by some diners who diligently follow the guide for all their meals and don’t look beyond it or develop their own opinions, analogous to the wine enthusiasts who will only drink wines with 90+ Parker points.

One obvious reason it is taken so seriously by restaurateurs is that a Michelin star puts bums on seats and money in the tills, but maybe the guide is still relevant, flawed as it might be, because of the absence of a worthy competitor? Imagine you are a traveller going to a new city. You probably won’t know which local critics are credible, if they even exist. You could use Tripadvisor, which many do, but you would probably have more luck going to a psychic. The AA guide is just daft really. The World’s Best 50 is a just a short list of the very top places.  There are some major cities where the Michelin guide isn’t the only show in town, The New York Times, for example, is revered more than the famous French book.

We do reference the Michelin guide whilst travelling, not so much for our blow out, budget busting, meals, as these are places we are already aware of and have booked well in advance, but more often for the bib gourmand restaurants. When we travel we tend to go to a whole range of restaurants on all ends of the spectrum. Along with the knockout meals, we will look for the best market stalls, street food and occasionally cook for ourselves if renting our accommodation. But for the every-day lunch or dinner we will, quite often, look up the local Bib Gourmands. ETTO, in Dublin, a restaurant we eat in regularly, is the perfect example of a bib gourmand. Excellent produce, cooked well, resulting in tasty, flavoursome, no-fuss and affordable food. 

If a restaurant we frequent were to be awarded a star we would be happy for them, but it wouldn’t increase our enjoyment of a meal there. If our favourite starred restaurant was to suffer a loss, we would be disappointed for the whole team, but it wouldn’t stop us going back. A restaurant having or not having Michelin stars has no effect on our enjoyment of the meal. So, who cares if you don’t agree with Michelin? Why does it matter? Michelin’s guide is their view and they are entitled to it. If you don’t like it, or you think they are outdated, or irrelevant, then just ignore it!