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The Michelin Red Guides: French Tourism
growth of provincial tourism by automobile, Paris, and to a lesser extent Lyon, set
the culinary standard. Urban, bourgeois desire for variety came to include
provincial fare, but that food, even though altered for the urban palate, could not
surpass that of the Parisians.
Consistent with the general association of French cuisine with French national
identity in early-twentieth-century France, the Michelin guides largely ignored
foreign food. The foreign restaurants of Paris did not receive any stars. In the guide
to Belgium, Luxembourg, and the southern Netherlands, the city of Brussels, that
French-speaking enclave dominated by French culinary norms, did have a threestar
restaurant, and the seaside city of Ostende as well as Anvers and Bruges had
two-star restaurants. But only a handful of other cities and towns in Flemishspeaking
Belgium had even one-star restaurants, whereas Wallonia, or Frenchspeaking
Belgium, had a concentration that matched several tourist regions within
France. Within Belgium, more telling is the utter absence of regional specialties
besides Waterzoie. The fine beers of Belgium receive no similar attention, nor do
chocolates. No restaurant in the Netherlands received a ranking of any kind. 53 The
guidebook to Switzerland, the Tyrol, and northern Italy similarly ignored regional
specialties. There was nothing special to be found in Geneva, Milan, Neuchâtel,
Salzburg, Zürich, or even Venice; the sole regional specialties noted are the
unspecified “wines” of Maienfeld and the “biscuits ‘Ours de Berne’” in Bern. 54
In France’s own empire, it was assumed that the French ate French food. In
1930, Michelin issued a new guide to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of French intervention in Algeria. It replaced the older
Pays du Soleil guide that grouped the Riviera, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Algeria, and
the Mediterranean. In the new guide, Michelin advised French tourists to avoid
local water in favor of bottled mineral water. They were instructed to avoid raw
vegetables and any fruits that could not be peeled. 55 More telling because it was
less related to health concerns resulting from bacteria in the water, the company
took for granted that French tourists to the empire would be looking at sights rather
than experiencing the cuisine, a marked contrast to interwar norms of touring in
the metropole. The guide assumed that French tourists would not be seeking
couscous or other north African specialties, so it offered no such lists of local
cuisine. Recommended restaurants and hotels clearly served European, and
especially French, food. As was the case in Indochina at the time, French colonists
themselves ate French food, which symbolized French civilization and marked the
French as superior to the indigènes. 56 Tourists were hardly supposed to be
different. The exceptions to this norm are rare: whereas there are no regional
specialties listed for Algiers, Casablanca, or Tangiers, Fez is unique in receiving
the short notation, “gâteaux arabes (kaabrezel).” 57
Without question, Michelin reflected preexisting French and often European
notions of gastronomy while at the same time further defining them. In creating a
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