A real gastronomic coup. A revolution in the geography of quality at the table. Where good sushi can easily beat an excellent dish of French cuisine, so far the absolute ruler of the Michelin rankings.
Now Japan is the most "starred" nation in the world. The State of the Rising Sun breaks, it is appropriate to say, the eggs in the basket of the historic holder of world leadership, so much so that it considers it undisputed and indisputable.
In short, a real crime of lese-majeste. In the 2012 edition of the Michelin guide, Japan obtained the highest number of 3-star rated restaurants: some have been detected 15 more, for a total of 29 in the Asian archipelago. While the French, wounded in their pride, are stuck at 25 (Italy has six).
The new guide is out on October 21st and flags these 15 new establishments honored with the supreme accolade, adding: “the formidable cuisine is worth the price of the trip”. These are 7 restaurants in Kyoto, five in Osaka, two in Kobe and one in Nara, for a total of 296 restaurants awarded at least one star.
But that's not all: to further disintegrate the foibles of transalpine "grandeur", there is the ranking of the capitals, where Tokyo remains the first metropolis in the world with 14 "3 stars" against 10 in Paris. Little consolation is the fact that of these 14 restaurants, a couple offer French cuisine. But the vast majority won with sushi and sashimi, overturning the traditional evaluation criteria, which see the search for quality and common taste usually being preferred to particular dishes, not exactly mass-appreciated, such as raw fish can be Japanese.
And precisely in this regard, the controversy has already exploded: pitting simple sushi against elaborate French haute cuisine seemed questionable to many critics. So much so that someone is now proposing to draw up two separate guides, one for Japanese cuisine and the other for Western cuisine.
Propositions flatly denied – for now – by Bernard Delmas, president of Nihon Michelin in Tokyo: “Japan is a country apart, where many cities offer very high quality cuisine. For this reason, just as today we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the debut of the Michelin guide in Japan (in 2007, ed), we intend to continue the search for new stars with ever greater enthusiasm and interest”.
With all due respect to the blanquette de veau…
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