SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - September 28: Previously earned Michelin star honors are photographed inside Adega, a Portuguese restaurant in San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 28, 2021. The restaurant owners and the chef earned back the Michelin star that they won in 2016 but lost a couple of years later. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The stars will be coming out tonight.
We’re talking about the Michelin Guide honors, aka the Oscars of the fine-dining world. The California list — scheduled to be announced at a big “reveal” at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles — is bound to be one of the most interesting in a long time, what with top-tier restaurants facing post-pandemic challenges when it comes to staffing, the supply chain and inflation.
We already know that the Bay Area list will see some changes. AL’s Place in San Francisco has closed permanently, and Ajay Walia’s Michelin-starred Rasa in Burlingame is now the distinctly more casual Saffron. Will David Kinch’s highly regarded Manresa in Los Gatos — the only three-star restaurant south of San Francisco — earn a swan-song rating, even though Kinch is stepping away after Dec. 31?
Michelin’s early release of “new discoveries” in California adds to our curiosity. Just one of the 10 “new discoveries” last year — Marlena in San Francisco — made it onto the 2021 star list, so what does that mean for the 24 Bay Area “discoveries” vis a vis the 2022 star list?
And then there’s our perennial question: In 2022, did more Michelin inspectors make it out to the East Bay, particularly Oakland, where the culinary scene is so exciting? For years, the only Michelin star honoree there has been chef James Syhabout’s two-starred Commis.
We shall see. Join us back here at 8:45 p.m., when we’ll post the news.
Originally published at Linda Zavoral