Michelin stars: Madera, Village Pub, Baumé, Chez TJ

Uploaded: Oct 23, 2013

Four local eateries held onto their Michelin-starred hats this year, making it onto the 2014 edition of the annual restaurant guide.

Madera at the Rosewood in Menlo Park, the Village Pub in Woodside and Chez TJ in Mountain View all kept their seats on the one-star list. Baumé in Palo Alto once again received two stars.

What does a Michelin star mean? From the guide's website:

"One star indicates a very good restaurant in its category, offering cuisine prepared to a consistently high standard. A good place to stop on your journey.

"Two stars denote excellent cuisine, skillfully and carefully crafted dishes of outstanding quality. Worth a detour.

"Three stars reward exceptional cuisine where diners eat extremely well, often superbly. Distinctive dishes are precisely executed, using superlative ingredients. Worth a special journey."

Each restaurant also gets rated on ambiance, comfort, specialties, wine and more.

For more deets on the process and this year's list, read this interview with the (anonymous) Michelin chief inspector.

PS: Re my last post, San Francisco now has the most two-star restaurants in the nation, beating out New York and Chicago. Will Palo Alto ever come out from under that shadow? Doubtful?

Comments

Posted by Max Hauser, a resident of Old Mountain View,
on Oct 23, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Max Hauser is a registered user.

Thanks for keeping us posted, Elena.

To update my comment to last week\'s Michelin "bib gourmand" list (link below), over 400 restaurants were found worthy of recommendation in the 2014 Bay Area Michelin but NOT named in any pre-release press info, which also reveals almost none of the detailed critiquing, recommended dishes, etc., even for the 38 starred and 83 bib-gourmand (special-value) restaurants. All of that is in the other 500 pages of the annual guidebook, not the four pages devoted to these "lists."

The Michelin routinely recommends outstanding local restaurants that are even cheaper than the bib-gourmand choices (and some customers like them better), and it praises promising chefs who earn stars in later years. These are useful things for restaurant customers to know, so if you\'re interested in eating out, check the book. If your main interest is who\'s in and out of star status this year, breathless arguments are underway online right now. To many people, that seems to be the main point of the Michelin Guide.

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Posted by Elena Kadvany, a resident of another community,
on Oct 23, 2013 at 6:51 pm

Max - Thanks again for flushing out this post. I'm glad you made those points. I even saw that Soma StrEAT Food Park - a San Francisco food truck gathering, similar to Off the Grid but smaller scale - made it into this year's guide. There's a lot more to it than the star status talk!

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