We just got a Michelin star. Now what?

The restaurant where I work won a Michelin star recently. The star was granted mid-dinner service on a Monday in early February and was received first by our head chef on stage in Manchester, then by six of us on service that night crowded around a cell phone at the pass in Notting Hill.

The night of the awards felt a bit like election night. Half the kitchen was dazed. I watched the most stoic chef I know — a guy who taught me to put my palm on my searing plancha to learn that it’s “not really all that hot” — tearily plate turbot.

Cooking is culty. It leaves you weathered and smelly, not to mention a dull, single-minded conversationalist. Yet, people who love this job worship it. The Michelin guide is the ultimate cult, complete with anonymous judges and mysterious criteria. Grown men (and women, but sadly, mostly men) count their stars as their highest achievements. In the documentary Michelin Stars, German chef Kevin Fehling of The Table calls his restaurant’s three stars “the best thing of his life”. Alongside the birth of his daughters, he adds. This job comes with a strange amount of sacrifice, and a star provides some sense of relief that every relationship pushed aside, hour of sleep lost and weary trip to A&E was worth it.

Dinner service that evening was rough. Within 17 minutes, my favourite server trotted to the kitchen looking nervous. “Table 215 has a list of funny requests, and they say we’ll oblige because now we’re a one-star.” They had heard our whoops from the open kitchen and were ready to play.

Every day since, we’ve been asked to play. We’ve thankfully been booked out for dinner nearly every night since we opened 18 months ago, at which point the restaurant was a mad, bootstrapped operation with a lean kitchen team half-filled with green cooks like me.

Now the dining room is bursting every lunch too. It’s December crowds without the merriment: along with lovely and curious new diners, we’ve suddenly got list-tickers who are dismayed by our purposeful lack of demure refinement and are happy to tell us.

Some chefs are ready for this. Soho’s Humble Chicken won its star the same evening as our restaurant. “Michelin has been my goal since I was 15,” chef-patron Angelo Sato told me. “If we didn’t get it, everyone was probably going to quit.” For Sato, winning is all positive. What comes next is the two-stars campaign. For a restaurant like ours, and so many others, the path is a little less clear.

One chef who earned his first star in his early twenties describes it as “not expected or necessarily desired”. It thrust his spot into adulthood and brought with it a need to “re-evaluate the restaurant”, as guests came in with “expectations of what kind of place they were going to, overnight”.

A star launches a tiny neighbourhood spot on to the international stage. In an industry with such tight margins, that’s a blessing. But the uniform rating of one star encompasses so many different restaurants globally, from a hawker bar in Singapore to a slew of pristine, white tablecloth eateries.

Our restaurant is a cheeky, playful, loud, little place. We’re over here dipping Scotland’s finest lobsters in the deep fryer. Michelin knew that when it gave us a star. Its readers might not. We’d truly love for them to come eat. Just please don’t expect tweezer food.

Lauren Joseph is a writer and chef at Dorian

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