What's The Recipe? (Our Hunger For Cookbooks)

A man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (“Monet’s Table,” “A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews”) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as conservative as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Yet the new cookbooks show up in bed, and the corners still go down.

Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jansci slices, Sacher Torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.

Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? At the same time as I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning non-recipe main-course cooking at night from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theatre, and she would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could.

Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.

Yet the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages: “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook,” “The Adaptable Feast,” the ones with disingenuously plain names—“How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking” (a good one, in fact)—and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like “Dining on the B. & O.: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age.” Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as part of an appetizer” is all you get.

Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln or the Inuit ice oven or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert has a new book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone, on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort.

With their torn leaves and unyielding pages, cookbooks have two overt passions right now: one is simplicity, the other is salt. The chef’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. David Waltuck, of the ever to be mourned Chanterelle, started this trend with his “Staff Meals,” and now we have Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home,” and, from Mark Peel, of the Los Angeles hot spot Campanile, “New Classic Family Dinners.” (“Every single recipe was tested in Peel’s own home kitchen—where he has only one strainer, just like the rest of us, and no kitchen staff to clean up after him.”) The simplicity is in part a reaction to the cult of complexity of Spain’s Ferran Adrià school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counterreformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome. But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. I have in one month stumbled over six simple recipes for making ragù or Bolognese—plain spaghetti sauce, as it used to be known, when there was only one kind—with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.) Curnonsky, the greatest of the interwar gourmands, was famous for preferring the cooking of the provinces and of grandmothers to the cuisine of restaurant chefs, and the result was such monuments of simplicity as Tournedos Curnonsky: filet of beef with grilled tomatoes, poached bone marrow, and cognac-port-and-black-truffle sauce.

Simplicity is the style, but salt the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past, in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like, well, ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are happy to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.

Although brining is defended with elaborate claims about tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty, and all primates like the taste of salt. That’s a feature, not a bug; we’re doing what our peasant ancestors did, making meat into ham. Salted food demands a salty sweet, and we read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in bread floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil and flaky-salt sticky-peanut cookie bars for ourselves.

The salt fetish has, I think, another and a deeper cause: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what pro cooks have that home cooks don’t is what plantation owners used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves. (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonial, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cooks also salt a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyper-seasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food. But the poor home cook, without hope of an eight-hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can press-gang a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard, and so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand.

The urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath those conscious enthusiasms and trends lies a new and deeper uncertainty in the relation between the recipe book and its reader. In this the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and their contents spilled out like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed a natural tie, between the recipe and the cookbook, as it has broken the tie between the news story and the newspaper. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is.

So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” which turns it, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. Barbara Lynch begins her book “Stir” with a preface that sounds like the opening passages of “GoodFellas”: “We were poor, fiercely Irish, and extremely loyal. The older boys I knew grew up to be policemen, politicians and criminals (often a mix of the three.) . . . If I ever had thoughts at all as to what I might be when I grew up, they were modest ones. I might have pictured myself running a bar (in Southie) or opening a sub shop (in Southie). But having a restaurant of my own on Beacon Hill? No way. In fact, if a fortune teller had told me at fourteen what good things were in store for me, I would have laughed in her face and told her where she could shove such bullshit. . . . I marvel that any of us made it out of there without winding up in jail or the morgue.” Michael Psilakis, in “How to Roast a Lamb,” includes his own childhood traumas: “As I sat on top of the lamb, watching it struggle to free itself, as if in slow motion my father came up behind me, reached down over my right shoulder with a hunting knife, grabbed the lamb’s head and ears, and, in one swift motion, slit the lamb’s throat. . . . Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose.” You never had a moment like that with Julia Child or Joseph Wechsberg.

Another answer to the question “What good is the cookbook?” lies in what might be called the grammatical turn: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying grammar that enables you to use all the recipes you find. This grammatical turn is available in the popular “Best Recipe” series in Cook’s Illustrated, and in the “Cook’s Bible” of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born); in Michael Ruhlman’s “The Elements of Cooking,” with its allusion to Strunk & White’s usage guide; and, most of all, in Mark Bittman’s indispensable new classic “How to Cook Everything,” which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time.

You see a progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s “The New Basics,” and Bittman’s recently revised “Everything.” The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, and to anthology and then grammar. Escoffier’s book was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. Escoffier lists every recipe for tournedos and all its variations. His recipes are summaries, aide-mémoires for cooks who know how to make it already but need to be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the B. & O. cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.)

In “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” as in Waverley Root’s “The Food of France,” which came out at around the same time, the turn is encyclopedic: here’s all you can find on a particular kind of cooking, which you will master by reading this book. Things are explained, but, as in an encyclopedia, what is assumed is the need for more and deeper information about material already taken to be essential. You get a list not of everything there is but of everything that matters. Julia gives you only the tournedos recipes that count.

You didn’t want to master the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did master it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking really was adequate to our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in “The New Basics” cookbook, which was the standard for the past generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and certainty about methods. In “The New Basics,” the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of machines to use, how to handle a knife.

The cookbooks of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion, or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or from dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And, “Much of cooking is about heat.”

This all feels masculine in tone—no pretty side drawings, a systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written mainly for male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old “New Basics,” one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads the blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers.

Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, the best, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even, post-Pollan, skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.” Most people like it! Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A inadequate? Try Plan B: add roux. And so on, ever upward, until you get to the old one, which they knew on the B. & O.: add a little cornstarch. The progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield.

Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all’Amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.

The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.

All this is true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes makes something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for the exotic thing—green curry or paella—and though what you end up with would shock the natives, it may be just as good as or even better than the thing intended. Before I learned that green curries were soupy, I made them creamy, which actually is nicer. In politics, too, where the unwritten British constitution has been turned into a recipe—as in the constitutions of Canada and Australia—the condensation of practices into rules can make for a rain of better practices; the Canadian constitution, for instance, wanting to keep the bicameral vibe of a House of Lords without having a landed gentry, turned it into a Senate of distinguished citizens by appointment, an idea that can rebound back as a model for the new House of Lords. Between the rule and the meal falls the ritual, and the real ritual of the recipe is like the ritual of the law; the reason the judge sits high up, in a robe, is not that it makes a difference to the case but that it makes a difference to the clients. The recipe is, in this way, our richest instance of the force and the power of abstract rules. All messages change as they’re re-sent; but messages not sent never get received. Life is like green curry.

However we take cookbooks— grammatically or encyclopedically, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dressup, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not.

Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.) After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state without having to see it head on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” is the poetic equivalent of simmering the garlic with ginger and Sauternes before you put the cream in; the end is the cream, but you carefully simmer the garlic.

All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. Going back to our own primal scene, that’s why the husband turns those pages. The truth is that we don’t passively look at the pictures and leap to the results; we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs. The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the act of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It’s not the false hope that it will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our being resigned to the knowledge that it won’t ever, quite.

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game. ♦

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/23/091123crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all#ixzz0X3rt6INg

Lunch With M: Undercover with a Michelin Guide Inspector

One afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide.

Conceived in France at the beginning of the last century, the Michelin guide today has editions in twenty-three countries and is one of the best-selling restaurant guides in the world. It operates on the principle that only reviews by anonymous, professionally trained experts can be trusted for accurate assessments of a restaurant’s food and service. Major newspapers like the Times aspire to anonymity for their restaurant reviewers but rarely achieve it. In his recent memoir, “Born Round,” Frank Bruni, who served as the Times’ restaurant reviewer from 2004 until earlier this year, describes his efforts at camouflage—using aliases, wearing a wig and fake mustache—which were mostly futile once the dust-jacket photograph from one of his early books was posted on the Internet. Photographs of Bruni’s successor, Sam Sifton, doctored in several ways to suggest what he might look like in disguise, began to circulate on foodie Web sites like Eater months before he took up his duties.

Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists. The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in France, and only eighty-one in the world.

In 2005, Michelin launched its first foray into North America, with the publication of the 2006 New York City guide. (It has also published guides to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.) Since coming to America, Michelin has learned that its brand of Gallic opacity and unapologetic gastronomic élitism has been a tougher sell here than it was in Europe or Asia. (The Tokyo edition of the guide, which débuted in 2007, sold more than a hundred thousand copies on its first day.) Five years after its arrival in New York City, Michelin has failed to knock the Times from its perch as the premier arbiter of restaurants in the city, or to outsell the Zagat guide, which relies on customer surveys for its restaurant rankings.

This fall, in an effort to promote what the managing director of the guides, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman named Jean-Luc Naret, calls a “better understanding” of the guides’ means and methods, Michelin launched a Web site, Famously Anonymous, to explain to Americans the concept of the Michelin inspector; it has also recently opened Twitter accounts for its reviewers. But by far the most salient sign of Michelin’s new openness was its decision, this fall, to allow me to meet—and to eat with—one of its New York-based inspectors.

Naret joined me and the inspector for lunch. He has a handsome, darkly tanned face, and favors designer suits with flared-collar shirts and no tie. Although the inspector was never identified to the staff, Naret, who eats often at Jean Georges and is well-known to the restaurant’s staff, considered her anonymity compromised; she would never pay an inspection visit to the restaurant again. As a precondition of our interview, I was told that certain details of the inspector’s personal life would be obscured—or not divulged to me at all. When I asked her name, the inspector laughed nervously. “No,” she said. “Let’s not even say it. Make something up.”

I suggested the first thing that came to mind. “Maxime?”

Naret smiled, and then, with a soupçon of extra secrecy, began referring to her as M.

Maxime is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt “surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,” she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”

The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.

“You’re looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”

Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime, blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an occupational hazard.

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

Over the years, other publications attempted to challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo. A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent, Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March, provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for their restaurants.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that there were experts that should tell you what to do.”

“I’d love to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”

Bernard Loiseau, the chef and owner of La Côte d’Or, once told a fellow-chef that if he ever lost one of his Michelin stars he would kill himself. Loiseau had made a life’s ambition of becoming a three-star chef, a goal he achieved in 1991, seventeen years after arriving at La Côte d’Or. His ranking led to a line of frozen food bearing his name and likeness, and the Legion of Honor, awarded by President François Mitterrand. But by 2002 Loiseau’s classic cooking was losing ground to trendier fusion styles, business was slowing, and he was swimming in debt. As Rudolph Chelminski relates in his 2005 book “The Perfectionist,” the food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.

Loiseau’s death ushered in a dark period for the guide. In early 2004, an inspector named Pascal Rémy broke the company’s code of silence when he published a book based on a diary that he had kept of fifteen years on the road as a Michelin inspector in France. (Rémy, having notified Michelin of his plans to publish, was fired; he later sued.) Rémy’s book, “L’Inspecteur Se Met à Table” (“The Inspector Sits Down at the Table”), described the inspector’s life as one of loneliness and underpaid drudgery, driving around the French countryside for weeks on end, dining alone and under intense pressure to file reports. Michelin had always hinted that it employed roughly a hundred inspectors to cover Europe, but Rémy claimed that it employed only eleven within France when he was first hired, in 1988—a number that had shrunk to five by the time he left, in 2003. Contrary to Michelin’s assertion that every starred restaurant was revisited several times a year, Rémy said only one visit every few years was possible. Furthermore, he wrote, the guide played favorites—most notably with Bocuse, whose restaurant in Lyons was known, according to Rémy, to have declined drastically in quality yet continued to hold three stars. Rémy’s revelations made the front page of Le Monde. Derek Brown, the director of the guides at the time, denied Rémy’s assertions in an interview in the Times, but he remained vague about how many full-time inspectors the guide employs in France and offered an anemic rebuttal to Rémy’s claim that certain three-star chefs were untouchable: “There would be little sense in saying a restaurant was worth three stars if it weren’t true, if for no other reason than that the customer would write and tell us.”

The Rémy affair occurred during Brown’s final year at the guide. As his successor, Michelin hired the charismatic and outgoing Naret, who worked for many years as a hotelier, but whose professional focus has not been food. He boasts of giving more than two thousand interviews a year, in which he tells journalists how many inspectors Michelin employs in France (about fifteen), throughout the world (ninety), and in the United States (ten).

Naret introduced the idea of expanding into North America and chose New York City as the best place to start. The first New York City guide, which appeared in November, 2005, was created by a team of five European inspectors, who examined fifteen hundred restaurants in all five boroughs, and selected five hundred for inclusion. Their selection was criticized, by some, as Francocentric. The Times noted that more than half the restaurants that received at least two stars “could be considered French.” Among the one-star restaurants was the now defunct La Goulue, which one highly regarded New York food critic describes as “this dinosaur of an outdated, mediocre kind of French bistro on the Upper East Side.” And the 2006 guide failed to award stars to Eleven Madison Park (Danny Meyer’s haute-cuisine restaurant), Craft (the “Top Chef” head judge Tom Colicchio’s take on contemporary American food), “or any number of celebrated restaurants,” the critic adds. “It was one of those things, like, only a bunch of French people could respond that way.”

Naret, who says that he never intended to continue to use European teams, established an office in New York for the next year’s guide and began recruiting New Yorkers. He received thirty-five hundred applications.

Though born in New York City, Maxime moved with her family to a nearby “rural countryside” town, which, she says, has “an extraordinarily active foodie community.” Maxime’s family was discerning about food, and came into the city frequently to sample the restaurants. “I ate falafel at Mamoun’s and bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters before I’d even heard of a peanut-butter sandwich,” she said. The family also travelled abroad, and she learned early about the Michelin guide. “Other kids wanted a Barbie or something. I wanted to go to a three-star restaurant in Paris.” Maxime’s fascination with food was not confined to haute cuisine. “It’s a global food passion,” as she put it. Big Macs, tacos from “these divey little delis in Sunset Park,” Chinese food from “a Szechuan restaurant that’s a total dump,” even hot dogs from Papaya King’s grimy corner kiosks in Manhattan elicit groans of pleasure: “Oh, fantastic hot dogs!”

Linda Bartoshuk, a professor of community dentistry and behavioral science at the University of Florida, has for more than three decades done research into genetic variations in the perception of taste. Through studies of the disposition and the density of taste buds on the tongues of test subjects, Bartoshuk has divided people into three categories: supertasters, tasters, and non-tasters. Most food and wine experts would fall into the “taster” category. (Supertasters, despite their name, have too many taste buds and are thus oversensitive to flavor, and tend to prefer bland foods; non-tasters can eat an exquisite risotto and say, “Eh.”) I asked Maxime if she believed that she had some biological advantage when it came to tasting and discerning flavors. “You could argue that the inspectors have some biological makeup, or you could argue that they eat so much that they have the grounds for comparison,” she said. “And they have their training, the professional training.”

A degree in hospitality, hotel management, or cooking is mandatory for Michelin inspectors. Every job that Maxime held, from high school on, had been in the domestic food, wine, or restaurant industry. She got a master’s from N.Y.U. in food studies, and obtained a sommelier’s certification. Six years ago, she was working in a food-and-hospitality job in a city far from New York when she learned that Michelin was recruiting inspectors to produce a New York City guide. “I immediately started stalking Jean-Luc,” she said. She had several preliminary interviews in New York, during which she was warned about the rigors of life as an inspector—the travel, the regimen of constant eating, the pressure to fill out meticulously detailed reports on time, the enforced anonymity, the low pay. (“Let’s just say it’s not about the money,” she said.)

“The interview process is a bit like trying to scare you off,” she went on. “You really have to be committed. It’s your life. It’s not like a nine-to-five job.” Nor is it all about three-star dining. “The stars are only ten per cent of the selection,” she said. “The vast majority of the time, we’re hiking around the Upper East Side, we’re eating at neighborhood restaurants, we’re hiking around Brooklyn.” Assigned specific areas of the city to cover, Maxime, who lives in Manhattan, spends weeks riding the subway out to the farthest reaches of Queens to make her way through a selection of Thai restaurants, eating two meals a day, every day, and she typically eats alone, since talking with a spouse or friend is frowned upon.

After making the first cut, she was obliged to order and eat a series of dinners in New York restaurants under the scrutiny of seasoned European inspectors. “You don’t know what you’re doing, so you’re, like, What do I pick? What do I eat? And then they show you the wine list to see what wine you choose.” After the meal, she was required to write a paper analyzing the experience, while an inspector looked on. “And then there’s also the kind of covert-ops part,” she said. “You never know the name of the person you’re meeting, you never know where they’re meeting you until right before, so they call you up and say ‘Meet me at the corner of XYZ and XYZ.’ ”

All candidates are flown to France to take part in the Michelin training program. “You’ve got to go to the mother ship to understand the origins of the system,” she said. The fundamentals include not only the star rankings but also the couverts: the crossed-knife-and-spoon icons used to rank the ambience, comfort, and service of a given restaurant. The couverts range from one to four, in ascending order of quality, and they can be in black or red ink. (Red ink denotes exceptional service and décor.) After their time in France, trainees receive additional instruction in another European country. Maxime was sent to England, where, she says, she contracted her only bout of food poisoning, from a pork-belly dish.

When she returned to New York, she was required to apprentice under one of the European inspectors. “There’s no point in sending you off on your own if you’re going to come back and say, ‘I don’t know if it’s a two-couvert or a three-couvert’ or ‘Oh, I thought it was a star’ ”—only to have the senior inspector go back to the restaurant and discover that the food is, as she put it, “junk.” This period of apprenticeship generally lasts three to six months, but at any point an applicant can be told that he or she is not working out.

The waiter arrived and placed before Maxime a large white plate. At the center was her foie gras, a short pillar of puréed duck liver on a piece of crisp toast with a lacy web of caramelized sugar on top; the sides were studded with cherries and sprinkled with pistachios, and a transparent sauce, made of white port gelée, surrounded the entire creation like a moat. She considered the dish for a few moments, as if trying to determine the best angle of attack. With the side of her fork, she broke off a piece of the complicated construction, and tasted it. The dish, which I later tried, activated every sense with which humans are equipped: the foie gras was smooth and as rich as butter, its silky texture contrasting with the caramelized sugar, which shattered like a pane of microscopically thin glass against the teeth and tongue, its sweetness offset by the sour cherries, the rounded aromatic flavor of the toasted nuts, and the texture and taste of the port gelée.

“Excellent,” Maxime said.

I asked her what she liked about it.

“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’ ” she said. “It’s an analysis. You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’ And then you’re looking at the creativity. Did it work? Did the balance of ingredients work? Was there good texture? Did everything come together? Did something overpower something else? Did something not work with something else? The pistachios—everything was perfect.”

When her second appetizer arrived—the crab toast topped with toasted sesame seeds—she dipped the tines of her fork into a thick line of dark-green sauce that bisected the narrow rectangle of crab toast, and touched it to her tongue. Her eyes grew wide.

“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”

Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite. “It’s perfectly cooked,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, it’s textbook.”

For New York City’s chefs—particularly those raised and trained in France—the arrival of the Michelin guide was both a blessing and a curse. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, a three-star Michelin restaurant in midtown Manhattan, attended culinary school in France and trained in several three-star restaurants there. “Most of us very young cooks were aspiring to be one day a three-star chef,” Ripert told me. “Very few of us were aspiring to have a bistro.” But when Ripert joined Le Bernardin, in 1991, Michelin did not yet have an outpost in New York, and there were no plans to open one. “I remember sometimes chefs here, especially the French ones—and even some American ones—we were a bit frustrated that we will never be judged by Michelin,” Ripert said. “But at the same time we were a little bit, like, more relaxed because obviously the Michelin puts pressure on chefs and restaurateurs to be excellent.”

Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller’s Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the début issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated. “Today when I wake up and I go to work I don’t think guide, I don’t think stars,” he insisted. “You can’t. When I go to work, I think about my day and about what I have to achieve during my day as a chef.” Still, Ripert admitted that, just before the publication of a new guide, he gets nervous. “It’s not in my mind until a week before, and then every day I think about it,” he said.

Like Ripert, Jean-Georges Vongerichten trained in three-star restaurants in France, and he was eager to know how its inspectors would rate him internationally, yet he also dreaded that knowledge. At a party thrown by Michelin at Rockefeller Center on the evening that this year’s star rankings were announced, I spoke to Vongerichten, a dapper man with slicked-back dark hair and intense dark eyes. He was “happy and relieved,” he said, to have retained his three-star ranking for Jean Georges, but he added, “Ah, but we lost a star, too—for my restaurant JoJo.” He was referring to the moderately priced restaurant he runs out of a town house on East Sixty-fourth Street. In the previous four guides, JoJo had earned one star. Now it had none. Vongerichten was determined to get the rating back. “I will ask for the report on JoJo,” Vongerichten told me. (Michelin will, on request, supply to chefs the inspectors’ written report on their restaurant.) “I will study it. The good thing is, you have a year to make it better!”

Also at the party was the chef Daniel Boulud, a short, dark-haired man in a double-breasted suit, who bustled through the crowd, happily accepting congratulations from all who recognized him. That morning, Boulud had received a call from Naret informing him that, for the first time, his restaurant Daniel had been promoted from two stars to three. To many in the food-and-restaurant industry, it was overdue. Daniel consistently drew top rankings in the Zagat guide and for years had earned the Times’ highest rank of four stars. During my lunch with Maxime, I had asked about Michelin’s ranking of Daniel.

“We got beat up a lot the last five years for not giving him three,” she said. “But it wasn’t there.”

“In terms of consistency?” I asked.

“Consistency—and accuracy,” she said. “It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s not. A fish is cooked accurately—or it’s not. There’s the talent, the creativity that has to be applied to get a three-star—he has to be a very talented chef—but there was just a lot of inconsistency.” This year, she added, “it was so obvious. It was so solid.” Michelin sent inspectors back to eat at Daniel eight times over the year, Naret told me. At the stars meeting, which he oversees, every inspector’s report described the restaurant as faultless.

I talked to Boulud a couple of days later. Like Ripert and Vongerichten, he trained in multiple three-star restaurants in France. He pronounced himself “proud and happy” to get his third star, but I sensed a less immediate embrace of the Michelin system. When I told him that Naret and the inspector had said that the restaurant, in previous years, lacked consistency and accuracy, he didn’t exactly disagree. But he bridled a little, saying, “My restaurant is extremely chef-driven and extremely market-driven, and so the menu changes a lot—to the pleasure of my customers. Maybe the success I have today is because we keep giving pleasure in very simple ways or sometimes in a very spontaneous way and without thinking, Oh my God, am I perfectly consistent with that dish? I mean, Did I create the masterpiece where I don’t need to change anything? I just need to program it now?”

Boulud’s comments called to mind criticisms often levelled against Michelin: that its approach to restaurants and food is too wedded to an ideal of formal, technical accuracy that is not applicable to restaurants outside France. “When I lived abroad, in Rome, the Michelin guide was not, to be utterly candid, very helpful,” Frank Bruni, the former Times restaurant reviewer, told me recently. “The kinds of restaurant in Italy that Michelin smiles on are restaurants that feel sort of fussily French.” He added that the New York guide seemed to be trying to address this. “In New York—maybe because Michelin is trying to Americanize—you see the inspectors trying to move beyond that. Right from the get-go they gave a star to the Spotted Pig”—the chef April Bloomfield’s upscale pub-food restaurant. “In years since, they’ve given stars to places like Dressler, in Brooklyn”—a restaurant that serves contemporary American food with a French twist. “So you can see them trying. . . . But I wonder if a certain sort of chromosomal stodginess can ever really be completely leached out of the Michelin guide and the system.” He added, “The other thing that has always made me wonder about Michelin rankings is that they claim a lot of science to them, but is there a lot of soul to them? When Michelin describes its own system, I think, Where is the allowance for just a visceral, emotional response to a restaurant?” Bruni is also no fan of the couverts and other icons that Michelin uses: “Those crosses and spoons and all those symbols—it’s like hieroglyphics, it’s like cave etchings.”

The waiter arrived with dessert. He placed a rectangular plate before Maxime. He pointed to one end, where a small piece of strawberry gâteau rested. “It begins on the right, with cumel-macerated strawberries, cream-cheese sponge cake, and pear-de-vanilla-center crème fraîche; to the left is strawberry sorbet swirled with lemongrass glacée and lavender crisp; and, lastly, a blueberry soda with fresh blueberries, which you can drink directly from the glass.”

She thanked him, and the waiter moved off.

If she were on an inspection visit, she said, she would go home directly after finishing dessert and paying her bill, and begin filling out her report, which is made in the form of entries in a classification form supplied to all Michelin inspectors. She would list every ingredient in everything she ate, and the specifics of every preparation. She would rate these according to several criteria, including quality of the products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef. Then she would fill out the section that deals with setting, comfort, and service—and that determines the number of couverts the restaurant will earn. “I’ll talk about the service, the crowd, the décor, the ambience, the wine list, the sake list—whatever is applicable,” Maxime said. “The salt, the glasses, everything about the experience you had from the second you made the phone call to book the reservation, to when you walked in the door, when the hostess greeted you—or didn’t greet you—to whatever little goodies you have at the end of the meal.” For a restaurant like Jean Georges, filling out the reports would take two to three hours. A Chinese restaurant might take an hour.

It was three o’clock by the time we emerged onto the street in front of the restaurant. I couldn’t recall ever feeling so full. I asked Maxime what she would do with the rest of her day. She said that she had to work that night, reviewing a restaurant in another borough.

Which one? I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you that.”