Michelin Restaurant Guide

The Michelin restaurant guide was first published in 1900 and was established by Andre Michelin. The Michelin restaurant guide was designed to help the wealthy Europeans to choose and be recommended a quality restaurant. The guide became more popular as the motor car become a bigger success and more people were prepared to travel to sample the gastronomic delights that were available. The Michelin restaurant guide is the oldest and most well known restaurant guide in the world, and is a valuable resource for people wanting to find a new restaurant. Restaurants can not pay to be listed in the guide. Restaurants will be visited by an anonymous reviewer who will sample the food and if it meets the required standard they will then be placed in the guide.

The guide is available listing restaurants in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Portugal and Ireland as well as concentrating on restaurants that are in the big European cities. The guide only briefly describes a restaurant with only a few words but uses a lot of symbols to rate the restaurant. The accreditation that all chefs and restaurants aim for is a Michelin Star. A restaurant can be awarded 1 to 3 stars depending on the quality of the food. Michelin stars are very hard to get and keep, and out of the 6000 entries in the UK and Ireland edition of the Michelin Guide, only 98 restaurants have one star, 11 restaurants have two stars and there are only 3 restaurants that had three stars.