I’m going to hazard a guess and say most of you reading this don’t find the smell of burning rubber particularly appetising. Tyre fires aren’t exactly haute cuisine. And yet, many of the more well-heeled epicureans among you will likely have found more than enough to stimulate your tastebuds at Claude Bosi’s Chelsea institution, Bibendum. A veritable icon of the London dining scene, the French restaurant’s name will probably sound familiar even to culinary philistines – and if the posters of a round, worryingly happy Stay Puft Marshmallow Man don’t give some indication as to where I’m going with this, the name of the building itself will: Michelin House.
Yes indeed, one of London’s foremost restaurants is devoted to the joie de vivre of the Michelin Man. He of the many inflated tyres, he who, in the words of early advertising, ‘drinks all obstacles.’ Granted it’s a tag line that only makes sense in those early adverts, where Bibendum – the Michelin Man’s official name – can be seen slurping champagne like an early finance-based Batman villain. Personally, I don’t think that advert gave a great impression; I don’t like the thought of drivers drinking, let alone their tyres. And yet it set an unusual tone for the tyre-maker, one that today has inextricably linked them to fine taste.
I’m of course talking about the coveted Michelin Star. Every year, Michelin publishes its guide to the best restaurants in the world, highlighting eateries far and wide with their distinguished seal of approval. The finest of those is awarded a Michelin Star; the top percentile might even get two. In occasions much, much rarer than blue moons, they award three.
El Califa de Leon, Mexico, image credit: EFE
Rather than star-based film reviews, Michelin Stars actually mean something to the general fine dining public. They can turn a humble roadside restaurant into a culinary sensation overnight, with waiting lists into the next year. And it’s not just French chefs that earn the accolade either; Mexico’s El Califa de Leon, a local neighbourhood taco joint recently earned its first star.
The question is, what made a tyre company the arbiter of haute cuisine? How did we get to a point where an inflatable rubber alcoholic is synonymous with hundred-pound lunch bills? The story is actually one of practicality.
Back in the 1890s, there were 3,000 cars on French roads, compared to 39 million today. At the time, Michelin made great tyres for those 3,000 cars, but even if every vehicle replaces its wheels every year, that’s still just 12,000 individual tyres they could sell. And given people didn’t really drive all that much, that’s a very, very ballsy estimate. Michelin needed a way of encouraging their French compatriots to drive more and, if they didn’t have a car yet, to consider buying one.
And so the brothers behind Michelin – Andre and Edouard – came up with an idea. He hunted down the best restaurants and attractions along French roads and put them all down in one handy, red-covered guide. It included maps, refuelling points and of course tips on how to change a tyre, anything that the ‘modern’ driver needed to make their trips a good one.
The nascent guide was free to all and sundry, a promotional tool rather than a product in its own right. That was until Andrew Michelin discovered his marketing passion project was being used as a glorified doorstop, propping up the workbench of an out-of-the-way tyre shop. That simply wouldn’t do. Instead, to give the guide some intrinsic value, Andre rebranded his little red book, selling it for seven Francs – and the Michelin Guide was born in the year 1920.
Along with the rebrand, the guide started to focus on its most successful aspect, the restaurants. It began to list hotels in Paris and started to divide its restaurants into specific categories, highlighting what they considered the best and most interesting. The only problem was that even with two of them, the Michelin brothers couldn’t visit every restaurant listed. At the same time, they didn’t want to recommend sub-par establishments; their tyres’ burgeoning epicurean reputation was on the line. And so they recruited mystery diners to visit and review restaurants anonymously.
Claude Bosi at Bibendum, London
To signal that a restaurant was up to scratch, the guide highlighted them with a single star. This then grew to a hierarchy of zero, one, two and three stars. By the late 1920s, the Michelin Guide was a force to be reckoned with and very specifically drew discerning diners to its higher-awarded recommendations. For the restaurants (and the public in general) however, the difference between the ratings was as much a mystery as the diners. And so, in 1936, the criteria for the ratings were officially published.
It wasn’t just a vibe check, but a genuine, itinerated dive into what Michelin was looking for. Not only did this draw back the curtain, but it meant that restaurants could start actively catering to the aspects that would earn them a star. It turned a vague notion of quality into a check as rigid as any MOT. It was this rigidity and in-depth rating system that helped give the Michelin Star the kind of gravitas it has today, not dependent on the Michelin inspectors’ flair for writing, like with most reviewers, but looking at things from a technical, quantitative angle.
Nearly a century later and Michelin doesn’t need to be producing a little red book to sell tyres; there are more than enough cars on the road to keep them ticking over. But to this day, the Michelin Guide, despite being very much its own thing, is still under the auspices of Michelin Tyres. So next time you find yourself dining out at Bibendum, with its namesake mascot leering down at your perfectly presented plate of fine French food, just remember how it all got there. Even if it wasn’t by car, we still have tyres to thank.
