Grace, which opened in 2012, earned 3 stars in 2015 and kept them until it closed in 2017.
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That is one of the problems with the dataset I pulled from (Wikipedia), it only shows 3 Michelin star restaurants that currently hold it, it doesn’t include any that obtained 3 stars and lost it/closed within that time period. I’m sure there are some other examples like Grace, but I haven’t been able to find a complete data set of all Michelin star places and their star history. If anyone had any lead that’d be awesome.
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The NYC list is complete:
As is SF:
I bet others are as well
Someone should make a consolidated list…
Yep. The NYC and SF list are fairly complete. I originally pulled from world wide list List of Michelin 3-star restaurants - Wikipedia
Some cities like Paris or countries like France and Japan with large amounts of Michelin star places don’t have complete Wikipedia entries with that granular data unfortunately.
Try not to lose any sleep over this.
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Michelin stars are meaningless in the US. And have much less influence in our social media influenced culture everywhere. Michelin’s greatest competitor is Instagram.
Very sad to hear this. One of the greatest lunches of my life was at Le Bernardin
I think this is true to a certain strata of diner, but I don’t think it’s true to the industry generally.
I personally find them meaningless in the US. A better phrasing would be Michelin ratings for the US are unreliable, rather than meaningless. But their ratings are no real indicator of relative quality in the US…
I’ll agree the rating have different utility in the US, versus say Europe. It’s a marker, more for ***, of a certain type of restaurant. Some to avoid and some to seek out. Apologies if explicating the obvious.
All ratings are unreliable. 
But I do think they are meaningful to the industry and I know restaurateurs care about getting them quite a bit. If they were meaningless, there wouldn’t be consultants telling people how to get them. There was just a thread this month by someone asking for a great nyc experience and indicating that Michelin stars were important.
Very much this. For a long time, it seemed a Michelin Star in NYC was more like a participation sticker. I mean, Spotted Pig had a star… NY is an awesome food destination, but the Michelin Guide hasn’t done a great job there.
The Michelin standards are very variable between regions. Hong Kong also suffers from this, but then in some European countries getting just one star requires almost 3 star level in those cities. I just had lunch in Amsterdam at a Bib Gourmand restaurant that would have been knocking 2 stars in NYC.
I never understood why Jean Georges had 3 stars, I’m glad they put it back down to where it belongs. I had better dinners at Gilt when it was still open than ever at J-G.
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+1 to this.
Some years ago I asked the owner of a (then) fantastic three star in Burgundy what the difference between two and three stars was. She replied “consistency”. That really rings true for top French restaurants. But for many of the NYC ones it seems far from the case.
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Danny did not give away EMP for free I can assure you or even close to it. That said, when he designed it, he didn’t intend it to be a three star restaurant. That was Daniel Humm’s goal. I once asked Daniel how Danny Meyer felt about EMP being three stars and his reply was “I don’t know.” This was before the sale.
Le Bernardin doesn’t belong in the Michelin *** category. In France it would be lucky to even be a one star restaurant. All I can say is they have a great PR operation.
Of all the restaurants discussed I think Atomix is a clear candidate for promotion to three star status if they wanted to achieve it with a bit of work.
Well I know what I heard but that is not the point. Please tell me if Danny Meyer made more money from Eleven Madison or Shake Shack and the magnitude of the difference. His current public holdings minus any options is currently worth $100mm. The point is that it is very hard to make money from fine dining.
Well that’s the point is was responding to which—based on my knowledge—was woefully incorrect.
If you look at my original comment it was in the context of explaining the economics of the restaurant business. Saying he gave it away for free was clearly artistic license to say he had a restaurant that had 4 stars from the NY Times and 3 Michelin stars which came right around the time of the sale that he clearly did not value. He sold the restaurant to Will, Daniel and Noam Gottesman. The majority of the proceeds were used to pay the investors back. I have zero idea how much profit he made on the sale or future profit he made. Given the low margins on fine dining and since he had investors my guess is that it is a pittance compared to what he made on Shake Shack and that explains the economic conundrum of three star dining.
What do you see as the conundrum? Isn’t it expected Shake Shack, a business with over 400 locations, would, as a business model, dominate EMP?
At the core, they are both low-margin* businesses with one having a very high cost of production while the other having a very high cost to growth. Both are very difficult concepts to create and maintain.
*Shake Shack has razor thin margins (and are now experiencing losses due to the inability to keep up with inflation). I don’t know how EMP has fared, but I would expect a better cushion. Maybe @ybarselah can say if 20% margins are a reasonable guess for EMP. Either way, when you only have <100 seats, even at a $750pp average cover, you are talking 30k a night or 9M a year vs >700M a year for Shake Shack. What would you pay for a no growth, highly competitive business? 2x revenue? Less? Shake Shack, forgetting that their PE is very large due to make close to zero or negative profits, will probably settle around MCD or so in the 20-30 range. Either way, as a business, it makes sense you would value owning Shake Shack much higher than owning a 3 Michelin star or similar singleton restaurant.
The conundrum is that it is almost impossible to make make money as a three star restaurant. See Noma. I see it as a conundrum because the harder you work, the more critical acclaim you get the harder it is to make a profit.
BTW - 20% margins for EMP would be absurdly high. Low single digits would be my guess.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s 10%. Hard to say. Really depends on alcohol spending as a share revenue. I’d be surprised if it was now negative but you never know. They would be in good company with Noma and Shake Shack
The Noma comparison may or may not make sense. Just pointing at a small loss or an interview isn’t everything. As you know, many businesses lose money but they are not all the same: Noma has 1/2 the seats of EMP and I have no idea how they run it as a business and whether they are making good choices. Also, I don’t know how the restaurant fits into a broader business strategy. Like loss-leading 5th Avenue storefronts used as marketing, if the goal is high margin pop-ups, books, etc then maybe it makes sense?
I am not saying it is a good business and Noma was just mismanaged. I remember speaking with Jodi about Atera and the story wasn’t that different. Excellence and business are often in tension. We see this all over: world class soccer, F1, etc.