Michelin

A day after the award, lines formed midmorning outside the nondescript Morning Sun Eatery in Quezon City.

By nightfall, the family-run carinderia’s unnamed cook was exhausted from cooking batch after batch of the eatery’s Ilocano comfort food for the sudden throng of the “great food curious.” The sudden distinction took its pound of flesh.

That was how fast things went from the night before when Morning Sun Eatery unexpectedly made it to the Michelin Guide’s first-ever Philippine edition’s “Bib Gourmand” list of 25 food spots in Metro Manila and nearby places and in Cebu City.

News reports indicated the Michelin Guide’s electrifying first-ever Philippine edition not only unleashed an online tsunami of food-related posts but hordes of real and actual curious food tasters walking or driving all over, two days after the Guide’s lists were made public.

Michelin publishes its annual red-covered guides for 28 countries and a number of cities around the world and has been doing so for some 100 years.

A “Bib Gourmand” badge — meaning simple, recognizable, and easy to eat food at reasonable prices — is a notch below a Michelin starred-restaurant, however.

This year, the food industry-changing guide awarded its much-coveted one star to eight expensive fine-dining restaurants in Manila and Cavite.

And it gave a historic two stars to Helm at the Ayala Triangle Gardens in Makati, whose kitchen is lorded over by mustachioed British-Filipino chef Josh Boutwood.

Two-star Helm was lauded for “blending creativity with precision,” while the eight one-starrers were cited “for their high-quality cooking… (and) common thread of precision, creativity and respect for ingredients.”

By tradition, the annual Michelin stars are awarded to restaurants and not to chefs.

As for Michelin’s globally-known stars — which are arrived at after Michelin’s mysterious anonymous inspectors reach a consensus — one star means a restaurant is “very good in its category,” has a high-quality menu, and prepares its cuisine to a consistently high standard.

Two stars means an excellent cuisine delivered in a unique way. With something exceptional to offer, a two-star is “worth a detour” to visit.

The ultimate three stars is a restaurant with exceptional cuisine and “worth a special journey” to visit. A three-star restaurant is “the” destination.

Of the starred restaurants worldwide, Tokyo this year has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants with 160, while elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong has 76, Singapore 42, and Bangkok 32 starred establishments.

A restaurant must serve unique, innovative dishes to earn a Michelin star. In contrast, a “Bib Gourmand” badge is for restaurants serving familiar, comforting dishes made well like, for instance, the Palm Grill in Quezon City which serves Tausug chef Miggy Cabel Moreno’s Mindanao-influenced food.

Beyond these two distinctions, however, the Michelin Guide also listed this year “Selected” casual Filipino restaurants: 62 in Manila and nearby places and 12 in Cebu.

Michelin says each of these “Selected” establishments “has been recognized for the quality of their cuisine… that reflect the country’s evolving culinary identity.”

News reports indicated that restaurants in the “Selected” list also had their share of eager new visitors.

In a sense, the “Bib Gourmand” and “Selected” distinctions are humble cousins of the somewhat “elitist” Michelin Stars. But the lists nonetheless are significant.

By giving these “humble” restaurants their due, the influential Michelin guide restated pioneering food writer Doreen Fernandez’s decades-old valuable insight on where the Filipino’s future culinary identity and soul lay: “Majority of Filipinos eat the native indigenous.”