Now, Michelin "inspectors" are human and certainly still susceptible to our usual cognitive biases, like food tasting "better" if it's eaten with a vermeil fork. And the economics of the restaurant industry make it difficult to profitably produce the kind of meal that earns Michelin stars without charging so much that your customers will demand a certain level of ambiance and service.
It will be interesting to see if this is a one-off for the Guide, or represents the start of a shift away from the dominance of 7+ course, white tablecloth places.
I'm certain that his food is outstanding, but it's also a good move to ingratiate yourselves with the locals as you start your business there.
As an aside, I have never been anywhere with more consistently amazing food than Singapore. You can pay $300 for a fabulous meal or $7 for an almost equally fabulous one. The first time I went, I ate at a couple of high-end restaurants, but on all my subsequent trips, I've basically just wandered around and eaten at random. I've never been disappointed.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Michelin star reviewers they used here were those "considers-self-Chinese, can't-even-properly-speak-Mandarin" Singaporeans with some kind of half western/half-Singapore restauranteur career and a Cantonese family.
The first time I went to China, 15 years ago, I flew through Singapore. "Eat well here, the food in China is terrible!" my ultra-rich Chinese-Singaporean friends told me. Still in China now, and I've since been back to Singapore: how wrong they were!
I just founded a mainland Chinese food-related startup...
i don't think true ethnic chinese speak mandarin. that language is something that was only recently (in the grand span of chinese history) imposed upon the rest of china by a bunch of mandarins in Peking.
in fact if you look at the chinese diaspora in overseas chinatowns, the predominant language might be something like cantonese. these people have avoided the homogenization that is taking place in their ancestral villages. in the straits settlements, various (mutually intelligible) subdialects of hokkien are the predominant languages among the ethnic chinese, but standardization in mother tongue education among these countries are eroding this uniqueness.
> It wouldn't surprise me if the Michelin star reviewers they used here were
also, the michelin guide does not use local reviewers in the first (or more) years of a guide starting up at a new city.
It's like, if you had an Italian grandfather you never met, never having visited Italy and literally unable to speak any Italian, you visit Sicily once on holiday, pick up a few words, return to the US, and open a Sicilian food truck declaring it 'traditional' and yourself 'true ethnic Sicilian', serving only one type of pasta.
Also, try telling the Taiwanese that they're "less Chinese" because they don't write simplified script.
And on your comment on language, go to Sichuan and then tell me if the chef in a food stall speaks decent Mandarin? What about people in Xinjiang? or people in Wenzhou?
Of course, educated professionals tend to speak relatively good Mandarin (they have to) but don't tell me that the Mandarin of people working in food stalls in the country side is any better than the Mandarin of people working in food stalls in Singapore.
People in Singapore are mostly Hokkien, Teo Chew and Cantonese, they claim to be oversea Chinese but definitely do not claim to be Mainland Chinese but, they've kept a big part of the Chinese culture and customs from their regions (and yes, the food in Chaozhou is much more similar to Teo Chew food in Singapore than to food in Shanghai or most regions in China).
I think you're just unfairly biased against Singapore for various reasons and don't want to admit it...
That and the fact that Singaporean students are required to study their mother language in addition to English.
Also—aren't most Chinese-Singaporeans of Hokkien or Cantonese ancestry? Their forbears likely didn't speak Mandarin. For that matter, Hokkien was the dominant Chinese dialect in Singapore until relatively recently.
Singapore is actually unusual compared to other diaspora communities in that most of the emigrants were from Fujian province, not Canton.
Singapore: Hokkien
Indonesia: Teochew
Philippines: Hokkien
Malaysia: Hokkien (although cantonese popular there)
Thailand: Teochew
Teochew and Hokkien are actually part of the min-nan dialect group which also includes Taiwanese.
There's also the fact that the HK film industry was fairly dominant for a couple of decades--if a Westerner saw a Chinese-language film before the 90s, it almost certainly had Cantonese in it.
It does, when you consider that there are real communities of diverse groups, each of whom have restaurants. Just last visit (one week, about a week ago) I personally ate at authentic Tamil muslim, Sikh (temple), Karnataka, Burmese, Korean, Lebanese, Yemeni, Italian, French, Sichuan, Thai Muslim, Thai and Thai vegetarian restaurants.
That doesn't touch on Nepali, Yunnanese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Malay, Japanese, Indonesian, Philippino, African, or other Chinese or western cuisine. For sure there are many more Middle Eastern places too, Russian and eastern European, plenty of Australian, US and Canadian places, as well as South American, etc. I've eaten Iranian before there too.
Nor does it touch on the significant local cuisine of the city (some of which is Chinese-derived), or specific regional cuisine from other parts of Thailand, virtually all of which can be found in Bangkok and virtually none of which can be found intact in Singapore.
what about a hawker stall would prevent the achievement of consistent results?
to me, in a smaller area there are fewer variables to control, ensuring a more consistent level of quality.