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So what about the rest? It was a year in which a number of French chefs were given two stars for their London outposts, Ducasse was put down for a likely third, and 26 new one stars were allocated. But it was also a Red Guide that left plenty of British chefs disappointed. Tom Vaughan rounds up the winners and losers, along with the small matter of a release date mess-up
It's all over until 2010 - the wait, the leaks, the rumours, the tears. With a tinge of bathos the annual soap opera of the Michelin results is packed away for another year. It's a time that, in the words of Sat Bains, chef-patron ofhis eponymous Michelin-starred restaurant in Nottingham, "makes chefs lose their fucking marbles for a few weeks". All that's left in the cold light of a scary January is the annual accolades postmortem. Yet everyone has a question or two about the results. Will Glynn Purnell's tattooist be loading his needle after a star at Jessica's in 2005 saw him honour it in ink on his thigh? Did Matt Tompkinson, a winner this year at Beaulieu's Montagu Arms, ever finish the sandwich he spat out on hearing the premature results during a Saturday split shift? And will those who mock Michelin remember the comparative meekness with which the AA Rosettes plopped into the public domain just three weeks ago? We can only wait and see.
It could be that the shabbiness of the results delivery is how we recali the stars of 2009 in fact, with Michelin accidentally uploading the results five days early, meaning news trickled through as chefs glazed the final crème brûlée of a Friday evening service. With all the gravitas of a local constabulary press statement, Michelin asserts that "an investigation is under way" regarding the incident
However, in time we'll probably come to remember 2009 as the turning point when France's big name chefs finally broke the London scene. It would be wrong to think Ducasse and co have had an easy ride over the years. Speaking in late 2006, the Guardian's food critic Matthew Norman summed up their limited success. "The recent record of big-name chefs trying their luck in central London is...