Calm the hearts of “quite terrified” chefs. Less than a month after the loss of Guy Savoy’s third star, the La List ranking will bring together the cream of gastronomy in Monaco this Thursday in a “friendly and generous” atmosphere, in the words of its founder Philippe Faure. A tribute ceremony to Mediterranean cuisine and its multi-starred dean Alain Ducasse has been designed to make people forget the red guide’s demotions.
The chefs are wondering “who will be the next”, regrets the CEO of the list. “The Michelin method poses a fundamental problem. He sends anonymous inspectors, they don’t produce invoices, don’t say when they came, don’t want to justify in any way what they found,” the diplomat fumes again.
Its ranking of the best restaurants in the world from guides and gastronomic critics consecrates for the sixth time Guy Savoy, whose third star removed shocked the environment. To the point of generating theories on the war declared by the red guide to La List. The food columnist of FigaroStéphane Durand-Souffland, denounced Michelin’s “terror marketing”.
” The dog barks the trailer moves on “
Accusations that come back after each demotion and from which the Michelin defends itself. “The dog barks, the caravan passes”, recently summed up its director Gwendal Poullennec. In the meantime, La Liste invites the best chefs from Mediterranean countries to the Principality to celebrate the common culinary heritage around wheat, tomatoes, wine and olives “without ranking”. Special prizes will be awarded during this ceremony, the highlight of which will be a tribute to Alain Ducasse, in the presence of the British Clare Smyth, the Italian Massimo Bottura, the Spaniard Elena Arzak or even the ‘German Matthias Hahn and also Prince Albert II of Monaco.
The Mediterranean revolution began at the Louis XV restaurant, a Monegasque palace in which Ducasse introduced “rural cuisine” and introduced the first vegetable menu in Europe. In the 1980s and 1990s, the establishment of the Hôtel de Paris “was at the height of perfection, starred chefs abroad wanted to be like Ducasse, we saw the future in Mediterranean cuisine”, explains Jörg Zipprick, co-founder of The List.
This did not prevent the Michelin Guide from sanctioning the restaurant “where nothing had changed” twice: the third star lost in 1997 was found in 1998, then withdrawn in 2001 and regained in 2003.