Restaurants like that would not receive a star at all, which isn’t a bad sign–it just means they don’t meet the criteria for a star review. They might feature a positive review in the larger Michelin guide though. Something not always understood is not every restaurant in the Michelin guide is even considered for a star. The star itself is supposed to signify a “baseline of service” as well as food quality, it is not a signifier of “food here is good” or “food in restaurants without a star are bad.”
A good BBQ shack may have food a Michelin inspector would rate very, very highly, but even the baseline 1 star requires a level of service that a BBQ shack simply doesn’t offer.
That’s the thing; the Michelin Guides are looking for a “fine dining” experience, but that’s not the same thing as good food. (And to be honest, I’ve rarely eaten at a fine dining restaurant.)
They don’t dispute that dining with traditioanl service is synonymous with food quality. The guide reviews thousands of restaurants that do not offer table service or etc at all. But as has been stated many, many times, fine dining is a very specific type of full service restaurant. The Michelin guide does not require you to offer a traditional fine dining service to get three stars. It does require you to offer high levels of service.
I can agree with the general concept that certain things are so easy to make that ordering them at a restaurant is silly, but for me that’s items like a PB&J sandwich.
Pasta is actually a really bad choice of an example, because pasta dishes are actually probably after sushi some of the dishes where the skill of the chef is most obvious from the very first bite.
Here is a picture of a rigatoni dish from one of the top rated Italian restaurants in Chicago:
I could make you something that looked very similar to that in probably 25 minutes or less, using Barila pasta, a bottle of premade sauce and a few other ingredients. The difference between what I would offer and what is in that picture is almost hard to overstate. Making high quality, from scratch, fresh pasta in a busy restaurant is incredibly difficult. Just a slight mistake in the composition of the dough, the kneading process, just slightly over or undercooking it, is a dramatic “hit” to the taste. An artisan sauce likely perfected over years by a master chef who has spent their entire life training in Italian cooking, is insanely different than something like Prego (or even a homemade sauce I throw together on my own.)
Honestly high end pasta is one of those things, if you’ve never tried it, it’s honestly difficult to put into words easily what you’re missing–this is one reason I’m a big advocate of people going out of their comfort zone and splurging from time to time on nicer restaurants like this. A culinary experience has to be experienced on a personal level to appreciate, the best writer in the world can only take you so far with descriptions.
As others have said. Nice is relative and IMO, doesn’t necessarily have to be pricy.
Every one in a while when I eat in at McDonalds, I remember a woman I saw on a TV show. She was living in a shelter and talked about how it was such a treat for the occasional chance to take her children to eat at McDonalds, talking about how clean and quiet it was.
On a YouTube channel, one of the hosts who grew up in China reminisced about how his parents would take him on the rare visit to KFC and would only buy him a meal because it was so expensive and watch him eat with smiles.
I took my friend who was somewhat of a tomboy to a cafe for lunch. It was nicely set up in a French bistro style and she said she’s like to come back dressed up in her black dress and enjoy dinner there. Sadly we never went back.
That’s very true; and that difference was a large part of why I wondered what constituted “nice”, as my “nice” means fine dining, and in fact a fairly broad subset of fine dining.
But plenty of places have stellar food, without being “nice” or fine dining at all. I mean, my lunch today was from a taco place that’s part of a gas station. Really delicious carnitas, but not “nice” or fine dining in any sense.
And there are places that are a step above casual dining that don’t quite hit that ‘nice’ place button for me- in general they’re chain steakhouses whose menus don’t change, and that aren’t really cuisine/food-oriented, but are more about providing a standardized, upscale experience for middle class special events.
I really do wish there was some nationwide US equivalent of the Michelin guides, but that had reviews on a couple of axes, like service, setting, food quality, food innovation, etc… That way, you’d get a better picture of the restaurant than one, two, or three stars indicates, especially when there’s a level of service implied with the star rating.
Just throwing an anecdote in here: My out-on-his-own twenty-something kid either eats from taco trucks ($2 burritos!) OR goes to “nice” restaurants. He and his friends will show up in hoodies at an upscale place and… spend!
I went with him to his local taco/tapas place. Humble little joint, but it had aMAYYYzing mezcal cocktails and specials and fresh seafood… and yeah, we dropped a bundle. Close to a hundred just on drinks.
Just went into a fancy place in Annapolis MD (not a super cheap town, but also not Manhattan) for a dessert and a cup of tea for my wife and a nightcap cocktail for myself, cost 50 bucks plus tip (not mad except for the 8 bucks for the glass of water for my wife, 9 bucks for me as I choose sparkling, which was the choice we were offered as we sat down)
For me, ‘nice’ isn’t so much about the food - as you say, you can get great food from a mobile food stall. For me, it’s about the whole experience - service, environment, atmosphere. The fact they don’t hustle you out quickly or expect you to eat with your fingers or collect your own condiments. Somewhere I would treat my elderly parents on an occasion.
I found the comments upthread about valet parking hilarious though - that’s SO American. You could go to the most expensive restaurant in Paris and not get valet parking. I dropped $1000 on dinner for two at the Fat Duck in the UK and there certainly wasn’t valet parking.
My sister and I recently took our mother to the Melting Pot, a chain of fondue restaurants that bills itself as a date night/special occasions place, to celebrate her 60th birthday.
Between the three of us and my 7-year-old nephew, the food, drinks, tax, and tip totaled up to about $350. My mom told me afterward that if she knew how much we were spending she would’ve refused to let us take her there.
That’s my personal threshold for a “nice restaurant”.
I would have never guessed that place was quite so expensive, honestly. The one a block from where I used to work was on the second floor above a 7-Eleven. I mean, I didn’t think it was a bargain sort of place, but I had it pegged as maybe running about $40-50 per person.
As for McDonald’s, we have to recall the original appeal: it had a consistent menu, so you knew were you were getting, and you did not have a 50% chance of getting food poisoning like with random greasy spoons of the time.
In college, a friend worked summers as a waiter in a nice restaurant so when we were at a fancy dinner once, he pointed out that in a nice restaurant, they’re paying attention to things like the level of the water in your glass, and will refill it before you ask. And I saw a fictional movie once in which the restaurant was anticipating a visit from the Michelin inspectors and they said there was usually a moment when the inspector pretends to drop their fork to see if the wait staff are on the ball enough to notice and to replace it quickly.
Here’s the menu for their location near my house (and, yes, they are indeed a chain), which my wife and I visited several times, pre-COVID. Their four-course dinners for two are about $100 (or, around $50 per person), but add-ons, like a lobster tail, or more dessert items, can quickly increase that price. If you go a la carte, you can eat cheaper (by choosing less expensive options, or skipping a course), but you can also easily send the food price alone well over $50 per person if you pick expensive options.
And, not surprisingly, drinks aren’t included, which can, of course, also easily add significantly to your check size if you’re drinking alcohol.
To me, “nice” means either one of the local places owned and run by our local James Beard award semi-finalist chef, or the AAA 4 star resort/restaurant establishment a few miles away.
The Mrs. and I just hit the former last night to celebrate the 48th anniversary of our first date. Total bill came to $210. A single glass of wine for the Mrs along with raw oysters, beef carpacchio, and superb preparations of Halibut over spaghetti squash and beef tenderloin over mushrooms and fava beans. Bufalo ricotta cheesecake and pear gelato with amaretto wafers for dessert. Dress was respectable but not fancy.
Oh, I’ve never been there. It was just seeing this view from the street that led me to believe it wasn’t an upscale sort of place. I used to work in the 12 story office buildings down the street to the left.
