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Akoko, a west African restaurant in Fitzrovia, receives its first Michelin star. Seeing the news, I dig around for my birth certificate to double-check something. Yeah, thought so. “General Hospital, Akoko.” We did it!
Here is another thought. In the past, a starred restaurant was somewhere that served French- or Italian-anchored cuisine. Japanese then penetrated that rarefied club. Notice the theme here. All high-income countries. All western or western-allied. When a challenger broke up their gastronomic triopoly, it came from within the OECD: Nordic, Korean, Basque, modern British, modern American, modern Australian. In fine dining, as in geopolitics, the west set the terms.
It wasn’t that food from China, India and elsewhere was unloved in the west. It was often more loved. It just wasn’t esteemed. It was entitled to well-meaning BBC Radio 4-level banter about chicken tikka masala being the “national dish”, but not to the grandest prizes (or prices). The book that has stuck with me from 2023 is Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet, an account of Chinese food and its long quest to escape its association in the west with moreish takeaways.
Well, now look. There isn’t a neater parable for the relative decline of the west since the millennium — as a share of world output, of armed power, of diplomatic leverage — than what has happened to the Michelin guide over the period. London is a good place from which to observe the rise of the “rest”. There is the west African surge: Akoko, Chishuru and Ikoyi have four stars between them. A Wong is the first double-starred Chinese restaurant outside Asia. The Indian grip on Mayfair, where Le Gavroche once reigned, has tightened with Bibi and Gymkhana’s second star.
In fact, a weird inversion has taken place: a starred restaurant in the modish east of town, such as Trivet or Cycene, will tend to draw its influences from the OECD world. It is in the central postcodes where the “global south” has most of its stars. You might expect the opposite: that hipster patrons would be the ones wanting to branch out. But Franco-Italian classicism, refracted through Japan, is a branch now. It has been so challenged as the imperial cuisine that eating it almost constitutes a bohemian act, or at least not a reactionary one.
So, how did all this happen? Did “world cuisines” improve in the restraint and precision that Michelin inspectors demand? That explains some of it. As certain diasporas got richer, their restaurants could sustain ever-higher standards in ever-pricier cities. But the larger change must have been on the demand side, not the supply side: with the inspectors, not with the chef-proprietors. As the west loses real-world power, it has had to become, almost without knowing it, more open in its tastes and habits. It is harder to speak de haut en bas when one is no longer so haut.
When Japan was a defeated nation, not long out from under General MacArthur’s thumb, its food wasn’t the choice of the global one per cent. When it became rich enough to hoover up American assets, that changed. So, the same elements, but perceived through the lens of success: I am afraid things can be as Darwinian as that. Without touching on politics, Dunlop’s book is more illuminating about the arc that China has travelled — from humiliation to eminence — than a shelf load of geostrategic tracts called things like Dragon Rising.
There were always “reasons” to withhold recognition from certain cuisines: that heat doesn’t pair with wine; that vividness of flavour is a kind of shortcut, like telling rather than showing in a novel. Well, the change of mind has been sharp, which suggests the issue was never the food alone. Michelin, once a north Atlantic thing, rolls into more and more territories out of mutual commercial interest. (It can’t not be in Asia.) No less an entity than the French state wants chefs to take notes abroad.
The seeping of power from the west will bring new answers to old questions of taste: what constitutes bodily beauty, for instance, or good art. But the most drastic change since I came to London from Nigeria as a child is what it means to eat well. The month before Akoko got its star, Le Gavroche closed down.
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