2014 Michelin Stars

The much-maligned Michelin stars have started to go out on Twitter. Ineptly they were first tweeted by the SF account… I notice they started with two sleeper favorites- Senza and Elizabeth, which each got one star. A now-deleted Sun Times article that came out obviously earlier than intended announced two stars for Sixteen and that Alinea kept three stars.

Melissa - do you really want these guys after us?



I'm sure it's 3:30 somewhere.

One star for El Ideas. They seem to want to redeem themselves.

Just announced it seems:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertain ... 5804.story

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere, but I always find the Michelin stars & intrigue worth pondering and discussing. For what it's worth, their taste in higher-end restaurants seems to line up more with my own than many other publications' does (Chicago Mag, for instance).

I was particularly happy to see Senza on the list this year. I went a few months back and found the food to be a standard deviation better than that of any other new restaurant I'd been to this year (good to the point that I was often pausing during bites to savor the experience).

The stars:

3 Star:
Alinea

2 Star:
Grace
Graham Elliot
L2O
Sixteen

1 Star:
Acadia
Blackbird
Boka
El Ideas
Elizabeth
Everest
Goosefoot
Longman & Eagle
Mexique
Moto
Naha
North Pond
Schwa
Senza
Sepia
Spiaggia
Takashi
The Lobby
Topolobampo
Tru

Interested to hear anyone's thoughts! I know the Michelin thing can be a bit overblown, but fun & useful for me nonetheless.

My daughter cooks at Embeya so we were hoping to see a star appear ... ah well, they're doing awfully well without it.

I generally have trouble with the Michelin thing - first seeing Bibs go to Twin Anchors, etc just makes me mistrust the whole process, then I have serious trouble seeing Schwa, Naha and Moto as just one stars. The scale just seems off somehow. And I'm still bothered by Vie's removal.

Guess I'll stick to loving the GNRs!

Anyone who travels (NYC, Berlin, Stockholm, London, San Francisco, etc.) and eats at fancy restaurants generally agrees that Chicago's Michelin's are bizarre beyond compare. I would say that in other cities the Michelin's are a decent way to pick a nice restaurant to eat, but Chicago's standards are all over the place. Especially with the Bibs. And there are a lot of highly-respected restaurants not on the list like Vie.