Guide Rouge’s star Brit
by Kristan Hinman

Judging France’s top tables

“Going to a restaurant is a bit like going to a party: you should always leave when you’re enjoying yourself,” says Derek Brown. He should know. In his new job as editor of France’s prestigious Michelin Guide Rouge, Brown eats in some 220 restaurants per year. Says Brown, “I guess you could say I’m always eating on the job.”
Michelin’s Guide Rouge, over 100-years-old and one of the world’s most influential travel guides, is most often referred to as the yardstick for good grub. Every March anxious chefs knock on wood in anticipation of the new edition’s appearance. Gastronomes around the globe ready their re-dial button in order to book the new three-star tables in France. “Macaron” mayhem takes hold: who’s moving up, who’s moving out? These rosette-like “macarons,” the one-, two- and three-star ratings, feed or finish chefs’ reputations — worldwide.
The 2002 Red Guide was Brown’s first. It was also the first time that France’s gastronomic community had been judged so authoritatively by a foreigner, let alone a Brit. “We love to hate each other, or we hate to love each other, I don’t know which it is,” he says, speaking about the extraordinary responsibility he’s been granted.
Any Anglophone who’s stirred the stock in a French kitchen has experienced the protectionist pride of mother and maître cooks. Accused of under-salting or overcooking, you’re still better off than accused of being British. “There’s this traditional feeling that in England nobody knows how to eat properly and you can’t eat properly anywhere — neither of which are true,” says Brown. His modesty masks the obvious coup represented by his appointment. “That an Englishman was given this job did shock a certain number of people, because of the guide’s gastronomic component. But you know, I was as surprised as anybody.”
Brown trained at a hotel school like most of his colleagues. However, he’s the only foreigner among the publication’s inspectors in France. He has worked for Michelin in the UK and Asia for the last 31 years but never ate for the Red Guide before becoming its editor. From the start, the French media expressed doubts over his nomination, yet he claims to have been accepted immediately by his team. “When you work inside a company like Michelin for a long time, there’s very little in the way of internal politics. You’re, as we say in French, just part of the sérail.”
Even within the empire there must be differences in working with the French, though? Brown says that Anglo-Saxon business tends to be more instinct-based, while Gallic management styles are based on “logic and facts, one tends to study a lot and not leave much to chance. I appreciate the French attention to detail, and their rigor.”
This year’s guide granted third stars to two Parisian restaurants, Ledoyen and the eponymous Guy Savoy. The third choice for a third macaron — L’Arnsbourg in eastern Untermuhlthal — sparked criticisms from surprised French food buffs who considered it an “eclectic” and “random” option. But Brown calls the remarks positive. “All three have reached a maturity that we can quite happily, safely and comfortably recommend. They’re each completely different from the other three-stars in the guide, but their level of cooking and the regularity with which they’ve achieved it is, for us, now assured.”
Brown concludes: “Our job is to make sure those standards are maintained, for the people who buy the guide. After all, very few people spend this kind of money on food, and those that do want to experience that kind of cooking without any regrets. Why do people buy Rolls Royces? To experience perfection. That’s something we as inspectors never forget, that consumers are spending their own money on this food, and would we want to do that too?”