Since 1926 the prestigious Michelin Guide gives this awards to the best restaurants with its famous “Michelin Stars”, the most important prize for all the world’s chefs. The stars are a symbol of gastronomic world recognition and they can depend on the success or failure of a restaurant, as they attract a lot of customers, give prestige and raise prices.

Each restaurant can obtain from one to three stars, and the guide itself designate them as follows:

1 star * = very good kitchen

2 stars ** = excellent cuisine, it’s worth deviating

3 stars *** = exceptional cuisine, table that justifies the trip

In this article we explain how to get the Michelin star.

To grant them, the guide has 85 inspectors around the world. The inspectors are professionals who have trained in catering schools and have a minimum professional experience in the sector, having worked in this field for a time that goes from 5 to 10 years. Later they are trained by the organization itself, being accompanied by another experienced inspector during the 6 months that the training lasts. In this period they will learn the different criteria to attribute the stars, the comfort categories and to evaluate other services and qualities.

Each year, an inspector travels more than 30,000 kilometers to visit an average of 800 establishments, including 250 meals in restaurants and around 150 nights in hotels. They remain anonymous and pay all bills to ensure that owners of restaurants and hotels can not influence their judgments and the more than 1100 reports they produce annually after visiting each establishment. They are inflexible and incorruptible.

Basically what the inspector values ​​when granting a star is the quality of the product, the mastery of the cooking point, the flavors, the regularity, the quality / price ratio and the creativity of the chef. If there is harmony in all that, they grant the star. According to the guide: “The stars correspond to what is on the plate and are not given in terms of comfort and decoration”. For comfort, the guide designates and classifies restaurants with cutlery and hotels with pavilions.

Before a restaurant receives its first star it is visited four times by the inspectors. If they choose or have 2 stars they receive ten visits. If the restaurant chooses or has 3 stars the thing gets more difficult, since apart from the visits of the English inspectors are also visited by French inspectors, and if they are not all agree to grant the third star, it is not granted.

It must be pointed out that the stars are always received by the restaurant and not by the chef. If a restaurant changes its chef, it receives more visits and more exhaustive controls to verify that it maintains the same quality. If you do not keep it you can lose one, two or even the three stars.

At the end of everything. How to get the Michelin star? It is not easy.