From Flat Tires To Fine Dining: The Odd Origin Of Michelin Stars

In 1889, brothers Édouard and André Michelin established their tire business in Clermont-Ferrand, France, but they had no logo. In 1898, a Parisian illustrator named Marius Rossillon, known as O’Galop, took his cue from an abandoned brewery ad. He modified it to depict Bibendum, a man-shaped tire figure holding a goblet of nails and broken glass. Below him read the words Nunc est bibendum (“now is the time to drink”).

Édouard and André printed 35,000 copies of a little red guidebook and gave them away in 1900, at a time when there were fewer than 3,000 motor vehicles in the whole country. Long-distance driving was not yet common or easy. But the brothers figured that getting more people on the road meant selling more tires, since the longer you drive, the quicker your tires wear out.

When the first edition of the Michelin Guide came out in 1900, it had no restaurant reviews, not a single star of any kind. The roads were awful back then, and tires were regularly punctured. There were no gas stations, so you could buy gas at a pharmacy, a cupful at a time, from a can. The guide became an essential survival manual for early drivers, and it included directions on how to change a tire as well as lists of mechanics, doctors, garages, and places that sold gasoline, along with the basics on hotels.

A Bureau de Tourisme opened in Paris by 1908, where motorists could order a custom itinerary for their drive. Within 20 years, the company had a staff of 120 and provided more than 155,000 separate itineraries per year. Michelin published its first folded road maps and, over a few years, delivered more than 30,000 free enamel road signs to French towns. It wasn’t enough anymore to just sell a book. Michelin was building the infrastructure the guide talked about.

By 1918, with World War I over, Michelin discovered an audience of grieving families and servicemen eager to find out where they or members of their families had fought. Starting in 1919, Illustrated Battlefield Guides were released for battle sites like Verdun, France, and Ypres, Belgium. In the next two decades, dozens of similar books would sell more than 2 million copies combined and keep Michelin Publishing afloat through the postwar era.

Michelin didn’t begin to sell the guide until 1920, 20 years after they started giving it away, pricing it at seven francs. They banned all paid ads, which effectively denied the company revenue from the very establishments they listed, including hotels, garages, and restaurants. According to Michelin lore, the idea to start charging for the guide came to André Michelin when he found a stack of them being used as a prop to hold up a workbench at a local garage. He concluded that nobody would take the guide seriously if people could just get it for free. Banning ads also helped ensure that the guide remained impartial toward every business it featured.

The author Maurice Edmond Sailland, who wrote under the name Curnonsky, became the most popular writer on food in France in the 1920s, earning him the title “the Prince of Gastronomes” in 1927. In company with his writing companion, Marcel Rouff, Curnonsky produced a 28-volume travel guide to regional French cuisine, urging well-heeled urbanites to take to the road in their motor cars in search of culinary delights. Curnonsky couldn’t drive, so his friends had to chauffeur him. His gastronomic pitch was perfectly timed for what Michelin was plotting to build.

By the 1920s, motorists were taking the Michelin Guide out on the road, wondering where to eat. The 1923 edition gave them their first answer, with a new section that classified restaurants according to their type of cuisine and price. Before that, restaurants had been listed alongside hotels and hadn’t really been considered a destination in themselves.

In 1926, the guide began awarding a star, which meant “une bonne table,” a good table. (There wasn’t yet a two- or three-star system. A place either had a star or it didn’t.) For the first time, Michelin was rating the quality of food served in the restaurants, not just listing their addresses.

Meanwhile, in 1926, Michelin also started publishing a second set of regional guides, with the first one being about Brittany, in the northwest of France. These were to be more comprehensive travel guides for tourists, covering areas of interest and geography, complementing the original guide’s focus on hotels and restaurants. Everyone knows them now as the Green Guides, though at first this wasn’t the case. The first to be published in 1926 all had red covers, and it wasn’t until the late 1930s that Michelin started printing them in green.

Between 1931 and 1933, Michelin went from one star to three stars and established the system. There were thousands of restaurants in France that appeared on the list in 1933, but only 23 were awarded three stars. Michelin had originally wanted the three-star rating to be extremely rare.

In 1933, Michelin formed a team of professional, anonymous restaurant critics. They visited these restaurants incognito and unannounced, paying with the company’s funds. They weren’t allowed to identify themselves to restaurant owners, a strict rule intended to eliminate any corruption or preferential treatment in the rating process.

Eugénie Brazier, a Lyon chef who was known as “La Mère Brazier,” owned two restaurants, one on Rue Royale in Lyon, another at Col de la Luère. Once Michelin had worked out the three-star classification in 1933, both of these establishments were awarded the top rating of all, making Brazier the first chef, male or female, to accumulate six Michelin stars at once. This feat was not repeated until 1998, when chef Alain Ducasse also achieved six stars.

It was 1933 when Fernand Point, chef at La Pyramide in Vienne, on the route between Paris and the Riviera, got three stars for his sauces, lighter in texture but still rich with butter. It was in 1935 that Alexandre Dumaine, chef of the Hôtel de la Côte-d’Or, in Saulieu in Burgundy, another country inn on a major highway, also won three stars. Both made a place that had once been a necessary stop for tired travelers into one that required a journey in its own right.

It wasn’t until 1936 that Michelin provided specific criteria. One star represented “a very good restaurant in its category.” Two stars meant “excellent cooking, worth a detour.” Three stars denoted “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.” Michelin’s choice of words was intentional: it defined outstanding restaurants by how far a motorist had to travel to reach them. This connected the guide’s highest rating to its purpose from the start: to get drivers onto the highway.

To ensure that food was kept separate from other considerations, the Michelin Guide introduced a scale of crossed fork-and-spoon symbols, from one to five, in the 1930s to rate the ambience, service and tableware. A rustic inn in the countryside might score high on food and low on the fork-and-spoon scale. A fancy place with a mediocre menu would get the reverse rating.

When Germany invaded and occupied France in the spring of 1940, civilian motoring effectively ceased, and Michelin took the guide off the market, leaving the 1939 edition as the last portrait of France’s prewar road system. In June of that year, Gustave Moutet, a Resistance fighter, escaped to Britain with the 1939 edition in his pocket. Some Resistance fighters claim he gave the book to Allied military planners, who were desperately looking for current maps of France.

After the Allies landed in Nazi-occupied France, they found that retreating German troops had either knocked down or turned over many road signs, an attempt to confound the invading Allied forces. In response, the U.S. military reprinted the Michelin prewar guide to France, stamped for official use only and packed with hundreds of street maps of cities. Allied officers carried their copies of the book into Normandy on D-Day to help them find their way around towns where most of the road signs were gone. It was now a street atlas.

On May 8, 1945, when the war ended in Europe, Michelin released an emergency travel guide for a nation with bridges destroyed, fords inundated, mines on the roads, and entire villages isolated. The book had no restaurant listings. It contained only the locations of operating ferries, temporary pontoon bridges, and open gas stations on suggested routes for relief supplies, allowing relief workers or refugees to travel between towns.

In France after the war, food was scarce, and black markets were flourishing. Even butter, meat, and flour were heavily rationed by the government. In these circumstances, there could be no question of maintaining the standard of cooking that would enable Michelin to keep handing out its coveted three stars. Rather than reduce the standard, Michelin simply decided not to award three stars for five years. Then, as French farming recovered, the three stars returned, still based on the very same standard Michelin had created and perfected years earlier.

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