Food & Beverage Establishments

More on my Rating System

I enjoy the simplicity of the Michelin Guide's rating system, but believe some of its definitions have become harder to interpret in practice. For example, Michelin's original framing describes one star as "a very good restaurant in its category" and two stars as "excellent cooking, worth a detour." In my experience, the prestige of the designation often shifts expectations upward, as many one-star restaurants are treated (by marketing and diners alike) as "worth a detour," which blurs the intended distinction.

Additionally, I've felt inconsistency in fine dining. I've had one-star meals abroad that were so far beyond certain one-star meals I've had in the United States that it made the shared "one star" label feel almost meaningless as a cross-city comparison. Part of this is taste. Michelin inspectors and I don't always share the same preferences, which is okay. They're trying to be broadly representative, and I'm just one guy with my own biases. The bigger issue for me is that Michelin's ratings can become hard to interpret when you compare restaurants across regions with very different competitive baselines.

So rather than trying to score establishments on an absolute "quality" scale, my system focuses on intention and effort: how much planning a place deserves for a traveler. Michelin asked a great question in the early days, "is it worth a stop / detour / special trip?", and I'm bringing that question back as the primary axis.

My tiers work like this:

• Tier 0: places I genuinely recommend that are great if you're nearby, but not a destination on their own.
• Tier 1: Worth the visit - worth going out of your way for if you're already in the area (or in the city).
• Tier 2: Worth planning around - worth making a main attraction of a trip you were already going to take.
• Tier 3: Worth the trip - worth building travel around, potentially long-distance, primarily for the experience.

From these definitions emerges a natural structure for assignment: Selected establishments are places I genuinely recommend within their local context. Tier 1 establishments represent the strongest experiences within a city, places that are clearly worth seeking out if you're already there. Tier 2 establishments are those that stand out not just locally, but across cities, among the best I've experienced in their particular cuisine. Tier 3 establishments are rare experiences that transcend cuisine or geography and justify travel on their own.

In this way, Selected and Tier 1 ratings are primarily local-context distinctions, while Tier 2 and Tier 3 ratings are intentionally normalized across regions and countries. The goal isn't to declare absolute culinary superiority, but to give readers a clearer signal of how much intention an establishment deserves.