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Stephen L. Harp
hierarchy of restaurants the firm revealed one of the ironies of its own and the
TCF’s efforts to encourage the development of hotels and restaurants to serve
tourists. Just as many elite tourists since the nineteenth century have attempted to
make a distinction between themselves as “travelers” and the less well heeled as
“tourists,” self-proclaimed gastronomes viewed the expansion of the number of
restaurants in the 1920s with alarm. As more and more middle-class people went
to restaurants while touring, those diners who saw themselves as preserving the
tradition of fine dining set themselves apart from the new hordes by founding
exclusive gastronomic clubs. These organizations, which rarely admitted women,
met periodically at restaurants in Paris and the provinces in order to sample what
they considered to be the finest cuisine in France. In 1939, R. Bodet estimated that
there were some 1,200 such clubs in France. 58 They included Curnonsky’s own
“Académie des gastronomes,” modeled on the Académie Française with forty
members and founded in 1928, as well as one that played on the title of famed
gastronomic theorist Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût. 59
One of the oldest and best known of such clubs was the “Club des Cent,”
founded in 1912 by Louis Forest, a journalist at Le Matin. The exclusive Club des
Cent was expected to include one hundred gastronomes who met together at
leading restaurants. Forest wrote in 1912 that the “mission” of the group was
to defend in France the taste of our old national cuisine, threatened by chemical formulas
imported from countries where they have never even known how to prepare chicken stew
[défendre, en France, le goût de notre vieille cuisine nationale, menacée par les formules
chimiques, importées de pays où l’on n’a jamais su préparer même une poule au pot].
Members of the group traveled frequently to the provinces and then reported in
detail on the fine meals they had eaten in the pages of the group’s private publication,
signing their membership numbers rather than their names. In 1921, Louis
Forest and Emile Lamberjack sponsored André Michelin’s entry into the Cent.
Michelin soon began to supply a carte gastronomique to members of the Cent
along with a special edition of the Michelin guide. 60 In return, Michelin had access
to members’ recommendations to restaurants across France. Both the notion of a
hierarchy of French cuisine as well as specific details about individual restaurants
were obviously well established before the Michelin guide introduced its system
of stars rating restaurants in the early 1930s. Michelin could, without comment, play
on the exclusivity that gastronomy had already symbolized among the wealthy.
The obvious hierarchy built into the stars themselves allowed Michelin to use
existing assumptions about tourists’ accommodations. Although Michelin may
today be the single organization most associated with a system of stars, the firm
was not, as noted earlier, the first to use stars or asterisks to rank either tourist
attractions or hotels. John Murray’s guides, which began to appear in 1836, had
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