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PARIS: Hong Kong and Macau are set to be the latest Asian cities to have their top eateries put on the international culinary map by France's prestigious Michelin guide, a little red book that can make or break a restaurant.
The two cities will in December each get a guide, in English and Chinese, the publisher said Thursday, appearing one year after Michelin took its first step outside Europe and the United States and launched a Tokyo edition that rapidly became a bestseller.
"Hong Kong and Macao are a door into China, ... two cities where there is a strong European and Asian culture, a great variety of establishments and 30 million tourists a year," the guide's director, Jean-Luc Naret, told AFP.
Twelve Michelin "inspectors" of various nationalities, two of them Chinese, have visited restaurants and hotels in Hong Kong and Macau, he said.
In Hong Kong, they pre-selected 1,200 of the city's 15,000 restaurants before whittling down the number to appear in the book to between 250 and 300.
Naret said the Chinese capital Beijing and Shanghai were also possible targets for future guides, "but why not also Taipei or Sydney?"
Hong Kong, a British territory until it was handed back to China in 1997, specialises in Cantonese cuisine with influences from other regions of China and beyond.
Cuisine in Macau, which returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 after 400 years as a Portuguese colony, is a blend of Cantonese and Portuguese cuisines.
Naret said it had not yet been decided how many copies would be made for the first print run of the Hong Kong and Macau guides, but he noted that last year's Tokyo guide shifted 120,000 copies on its first day on sale.
Eight restaurants in the Japanese capital were honoured with the much-coveted three stars. Another 25 were awarded two stars and 117 received one star.
Michelin guides give one star for "a very good restaurant in its category," two for "excellent cooking, worth a detour", and the top three stars for "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey".
The Michelin guide had been awaited with some trepidation in Tokyo, where critics had questioned whether a Western guide could assess Japanese cuisine in which presentation is as important as the food itself.
Michelin published its first guide outside Europe in New York in 2005.
Much of New York's media skewered it, saying it showed French conceit by focusing on French cuisine and ignoring the sweeping range of restaurants offered by the city's ethnic communities.
But it sold well enough to persuade the authors to expand in the United States, with new guides for San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The Michelin guide, first published in 1900, introduced its system of star ratings in 1926.
Its evaluations play a crucial part in the fortunes of the chefs who struggle to get into the book and rise in its ranks.
Three stars is a guarantee that wealthy French and foreigners will line up to dine in an anointed establishment, while the loss of even one star can spell financial or emotional ruin.
But the guides, which sold 1.2 million copies across the world in 2007, have come under criticism for focussing on the rarefied world of ultra-expensive dining and ignoring new trends in cooking. - AFP/sh
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