Introduction
Michelin star ratings is a critical area that needs excellent improvements in the Restaurant de Hotel de Ville in Switzerland. Restaurant de Ville hotel is a world-class restaurant that has been rated to be the best in the entire world. This Switzerland based hotel has an excellent Michelin star rating, with a 3 star which is due to its efficient and lovely services (Bouty et al.,2013). However, this rating has the possibility of generating several problems to the restaurant that might further dilute its quality in the years to come.
First and foremost, the Restaurant having an international recognition has tremendously increased the prices of its food and dishes, thereby making it too expensive to most customers, especially the domestic ones. The cost of food is heightened since lots of money is invested for the chefs to prepare a star food, creating financial pressures in the hotel, while the investment doesn’t at times pay well in the long run( Longhi et al.,2019). This is because the customers (international visitors) who shy away from the anticipated escalated booking costs opt for hotel services in other nearby cheaper restaurants. This leads to reduced profits earned by the restaurant, stagnated number of guests increasing the earnings by the neighbouring restaurants. It is however indeed a real cost to keep the Michelin stars high
The chefs are equally very busy struggling to meet the restaurants 100% perfectionism on the plate to comply to the international food preparation standards, at the expense of having some little fun and leisure time of enjoying life. This has even interfered with their marriages and further resulted to hatred from their children while putting them under unsustained pressures( Longhi et al.,2019). They have also been converted to a strange category of people. Their job is not just a simple career but a vocation or what can best be termed as a ‘calling’. The chefs start being trained at a very young and tender age. At the same time, they are being taken through an extremely rigorous process of mastering the recipe of a preparing varieties of meals to international standards (Clauzel et ai.,2019).
Economically, the Michelin star ratings of the restaurant are not beneficial at all. This is because there are a lot of expenses and increased costs in preparing conducive environments for the tourists through the extraordinary raw materials used, the installation of modern tourist facilities and the employment of highly trained staff including chefs, restaurateurs and restaurant managers who are generally very expensive to pay.
Profitability is another real paradox that is being experienced by the restaurant. Some simple neighbouring businesses make higher profits from simple sales of pastries and coffee than this business. This is because high profit margins cannot just be acquired from the bills which get paid by the happy patrons after their sumptuous dishes, but can be generated from parallel activities in connection to Michelin such as advisory services, hotel businesses and live cooking shows (Vukusi et al.,2019).
There also exists a serious issue with the supply chain management of the restaurant. The restaurant doesn’t have a very cordial relationship with its suppliers. In the normal hotel set up, it is expected that the highly trained chefs should prepare the best meals using the highest quality foodstuffs. It is however unexpected for the restaurant to invest in suppliers of low-quality food products to be prepared well by the highly trained chefs so that a perfect plate is achieved and vice-versa( Li,2007). The restaurant has not lowered the costs of production to its local suppliers by playing on the supply chain to ensure that they supply high quality foodstuffs( Li,2007). The restaurants chefs do not equally have a good relationship with the local producers, that can lead to reduced food prices. Consequently, most tourists who visit this hotel are very sensitive to foods prepared at very high standards, to an extent that they might at times forgo some foodstuffs prepared by it, based on the quest for improved and innovative food quality. This calls for improved suppliers’ quality of foodstuffs.
The Michelin star rating has equally been a great subject of conspiracy theories with regards to how the stars are allocated, the number of inspectors in the restaurant, considering both their quality and disinterest. After the Michelin guides established the hierarchy of chefs, it got obligated to maintain them. However, some few grand and equally gluttonous kitchens in the restaurant have insisted in lengthening their ratings even though their fashion and food quality had already faded (Clauzel et al.,2019). This has resulted to the evolution of the Michelin rating from the maintenance of food quality to an obsessive, manipulative and secretive mechanism for restaurants to keep attracting customers.
The rating has created a new customer format, the foodie trainspotter of those who are not focused on having some excellent meals with friends but are instead interested in ticking a cultural box and showcase of some bragging rites. The service gets to be both oleaginous and cloying with wide menus which are clotted with verbiage. This makes the restaurant rooms to be hushed, with a religious atmosphere created( Al-Aomar & Hussain,2018). The food is equally complicated beyond consumption in addition to its extremely high costs. The star rating has in the long run generated restaurants based on no regional heritage, but having cooks who have grown out of abused insecurity, vanity and increased hunger for positive customer compliments.
Compiling the most famous Michelin star guide globally is the most expensive part of the Michelin star rating. The star rating guide doesn’t indicate its number of inspectors, their salaries, the frequency with which they visit the establishments. Moreover, there are very many newly created restaurants that have been established within the last 30 years. Upon the public appearance of the occasional ex-inspectors, there are always eruptions of stories concerning tiresome and unsustainable lives on the roads which are covering large areas where the pleasures of food are made a solitary and relentless craft. This is a piece of clear evidence that the dining rooms rarely get revisited every year.
References
Bouty, I., Gomez, M. L., & Drucker-Godard, C. (2013). Maintaining an institution: The institutional work of Michelin in haute cuisine around the world.
Li, H. (2007). Essays on supply chain contracting and tactical decisions for inter-generational product transitions (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Daries-Ramon, N., Cristobal-Fransi, E., & Mariné-Roig, E. (2019). Deployment of restaurants websites’ marketing features The case of Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, 20(3), 249-280.
Vukusic, D., Grilec, A., & Mikulic, J. (2019). INCREASING QUALITY AND PROFITABILITY OF RESTAURANT INDUSTRY THROUGH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE MICHELIN GUIDE IN THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIA. Economic and Social Development: Book of Proceedings, 546-553.
Al-Aomar, R., & Hussain, M. (2018). An assessment of adopting lean techniques in the construct of the hotel supply chain. Tourism Management, 69, 553-565.
Clauzel, A., Delacour, H., & Liarte, S. (2019). When cuisine becomes less Haute: The impact of expert ratings on consumers’ legitimacy judgments. Journal of Business Research, 105, 395-404.
Longhi, J., Després, Z., Marinica, C., Marcilhac, V., & Marin, F. D. (2019). The gastronomic meal of the French through the tweets of Michelin star-rated chefs: characterization of the cultural heritage, and extraction of techniques and professional gestures. Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-Corpora2019), 21.