Michelin Misses: The Best Restaurants Michelin Forgot In Its 2024 Awards

It would be a fantastically bad idea for me to criticize the Michelin list. For starters, doing so would make it clear that I am not one of the company’s famed secret inspectors—even though I satisfy their traditional holy trinity of requirements: old, white, male. (Although maybe slinging shots at the list is exactly what an inspector who wanted to stay undercover would do?) But more so, when you’ve spent years working for a magazine that has its own longstanding restaurant awards, any criticism would be bound to come off as sour grapes. I mean, how do you say “you know, the city had to pay Michelin an undisclosed huge chunk of money (rumoured to be $5 million) to come to Vancouver” without coming across as small and petty?

And yet. No sooner was the list released than everyone I know started chiming in with their two cents on what the inspectors missed (or with headscratching on who was included). To be fair, I think most people are of the mind that it’s a very solid list, and I don’t know anyone who has cast any serious aspersions on the integrity of the judges or the process—no PR dinners here, nor special “treats” sent out by chefs. And, given that at least some, if not all, members of the judging pool aren’t from Vancouver, you don’t have local faves being elevated for reasons other than food (which is bad news for White Spot but good news for restaurant-goers).

Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to the catty part of the program. Because I have such respect for Michelin’s process, I believe an homage to their scoring system is suitable. So, I’m going to rank what I see as misses on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3-Star Miss being the most cringingly bad, 2-Star Miss a solid d’oh! and 1-Star Miss just a hair off the target.

3-Star Miss: Niente for La Quercia

The Michelin Guide doesn’t think too much of our Italian restaurants: none were awarded stars and only Magari by Oca was bestowed with one of the 16 Bib Gourmands. There are six in the Recommended list, but by then it’s too little too late, no? And while I appreciate that we’re not known as an Italian restaurant hot spot, we’re not exactly a wasteland, either. No fact furthers this point more than the complete omission of La Quercia, Adam Pegg’s temple of authenticity tucked away deep into the city’s west side. It’s a restaurant with such focus and purity of purpose—it has no equals on either pillar among the awarded Italian restaurants—that it should be tailor-made for the principles espoused by the guide. The irony is that for a guide whose initial M.O. was asking if a restaurant was “worth a drive,” my inkling is that the inspectors either didn’t make or rarely made the trek to Alma Street—and this is an educated guess, because we’ve on occasion had the same challenges during our own restaurant awards judging. But those who do make it are treated to a spot whose single-minded pursuit is capturing the ragione di vita of Italian cuisine. The inspectors did get it right by singling out Magari by Oca, but that’s a restaurant so infused with the DNA of La Quercia (their beloved late chef Greg Dilabio learned his skills beside Pegg—who was also an early investor) that to laud one and ignore the other is not just wrong, it’s nonsensical.

2-Star Miss: Suck It, Hotels

When the guide’s initial visit to Vancouver was first announced a few years back, the two restaurants everyone knew were locks on stars were St. Lawrence and Boulevard. Luckily, Bet MGM wasn’t taking action or some of us would have lost a lot of money on the second half of that exacta. In a lot of ways, Boulevard felt like it was created in the image of a starred restaurant: not one, but two internationally lauded chefs in Alex Chen and Roger Ma; a full-time, equally lauded pastry chef in Kenta Takahashi; an elegant room staffed with an uber-professional waitstaff; a locavore cuisine grounded in classics that’s still relentlessly tweaked with diverse global influences. And for all this they get a Recommended nod. Seriously, it would be better for them to get nothing than have to look up to, say, a Bib Gourmand winner like Little Bird Dim Sum and Craft Beer and say, “Maybe one day, if we work really hard…”

My guess is that this is Michelin trying to shed its old reputation as a lover of stuffy rooms with fancy china in favour of the low-fi temples of indifference in order to show the kids they still got it. But Boulevard isn’t a stuffy room and the food coming out of the kitchen is absolutely deserving on an imagination and execution level. To a lesser degree, Botanist gets caught in this same morass. It’s also a room with a very dialled-in chef—Hector Laguna—and they also go to the expense of having the supremely talented Kate Siegel as a pastry chef and their bar program might be the best in the entire country. And for the effort, they also get Recommended, the exact same recognition as their downstairs neighbour, the Lobby Lounge and Raw Bar, which, not even kidding here, I didn’t even know was considered a restaurant save for when they have Masayoshi-san come in and do lunch. Go figure.

1-Star Miss: Fine China 

Unlike with our Italian scene, we are known as one of the great outside-of-China centres of Chinese food, but while the guide makes more than a passing nod (one 1-Star, one Bib Gourmand and five Recommended) it seems their sights are skewed just enough that they’re not quite getting what we’re selling here. Their 1-star—iDen and QuanJuDe Beijing Duck House—is a supremely odd place. Never forget that this room landed on the scene promising “5-D Dining” (spoiler alert, there’s no such thing) while also having an “open” sign that I swear was purchased at Costco. No disrespect to the food or service, but I do note that it’s not the sort of place that sees a lot of repeat visits from those in the food scene.

The bigger concern is that Michelin seems to have been enthralled by the shiny veneer of the newer Chinese spots—in addition to iDen, which is quite swank despite the sign, they gave a Bib Gourmand to the very slick and bustling Seaport City Seafood on Cambie. Again, nothing too wrong here, but decor seems to have an outsized influence on judging for the Chinese spots, because the dowdy old-fashioned looking restaurants seem to get short shrift.

Exhibit A and B are Broadway neighbours Dynasty and Chef’s Choice. Yes, both landed on the Recommended list, but honestly that’s not high enough if the guide wants to go deep on our Chinese restaurants. It’s true that both rooms are not exactly sexy and both are absolutely getting hammered with the endless construction happening in front of them, but their food is simply too on point and flawlessly executed to stick them so far down.

Of course there’s more (no Blue Water at all, Maenam only gets a Recommended), but there always is when you’re bitching about something. The reality is that it’s a good list and, for a lot of the restaurants, really helpful to their bottom line—and there’s no complaining about that.