Three Michelin Stars Trivia Quiz

Answer: France

Flocons de Sel (Flakes of Salt), the restaurant of Chef Emmanuel Renaut, is in an alpine chalet at 1300 m (4265 ft) in Megève, France. He is known for cuisine which is inventive and marries texture with subtle flavours, often with mushrooms and plants he has foraged from the surrounding mountainsides. Chef Renaut first opened Flocons de Sel in 1998. Within three years he received his first Michelin star, and by 2012 he had achieved the third.

The Michelin star system evolved from hotel and restaurant travel guides published by the Michelin tire company beginning in 1900 in Clermont-Ferrand. In 1926, they initiated the practice of sending anonymous diners to rate establishments, a system which continues today. Based on these assessments, a small number of restaurants were selected to receive stars in the annual red guides. According to criteria Michelin published in 1936, one star was for a very good restaurant, two for excellent cooking worth a detour, and three for exceptional cuisine worth a special journey.

Answer: Belgium

In 1904, Michelin expanded its series of restaurant guides to include Belgium; by 2019, the guides covered 25 countries.

Chef Peter Goossens opened Hof Van Cleve in 1987 in a small farmhouse near Kruishoutern in the Flemish region of Belgium. When he received his third Michelin star, he was forty and, at the time, the youngest in Belgium to receive this honour. He describes his cuisine as contemporary "cuisine de terroir" - food influenced by the locality and those who produce it. His style blends French and Belgian cooking, with influences from Asia. An excellent example is his dish of marinated salmon, burrata, a light sesame puree, wakame, thinly sliced radish, enoki mushrooms and sesame seeds, served with a warm miso broth.

Chef Goossens believes mentorship is essential. As of 2015, over 200 chefs had trained under him.

Answer: Italy

The Osteria Francescana in Modena was one of ten Michelin three-star restaurants included in the 2019 Italian guide. Chef Massimo Bottura, who opened the restaurant in 1995, is one of a generation of chefs helping to evolve the Italian culinary scene. For him, it is vital to find a balance between tradition and innovation. As he has explained, "Tradition is important because it shows us from where we came. The past defines who we are, but it also enables us to dream about the future." He is a master storyteller. His cuisine blends the history and ingredients around him, making traditional dishes contemporary. "An eel swimming up the Po River" is saba-lacquered Adriatic eel served with cream of polenta, Campanine apple jelly, and burned onion powder. All are products from the area, ones that an eel who is making the journey inland might encounter.

Massimo Bottura is also one of the growing numbers of chefs concerned about food wastage. His foundation, Food for Soul, works with communities to raise awareness about wastage, hunger and social exclusion.

Answer: USA

Michelin began its series of guides to restaurants in the USA in 2005, the first featuring New York City. As of 2019, editions on Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. were in publication. A guide for California was set to launch in June 2019.

Chef Dominique Crenn opened Atelier Crenn in 2011. When Atelier Crenn received its third Michelin star in 2019, it was the first time this honour went to a restaurant headed by a female chef in the USA. She was also only the 13th woman worldwide to achieve the prestigious three stars.

She is known for her creative, modernist French cuisine. According to her cookbook "Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis of Taste", she believes food is a medium for artistic expression; one that can touch people in the same way as poems, paintings and songs. Her restaurant's subtitle is "Poetic Culinaria", and its logo is a nest symbolising the conjunction of art and nature. Each guest in her restaurant receives a nature-inspired poem with the lines corresponding to the dishes in the meal.

Chef Crenn sees a difference in the way chefs today interact. Instead of keeping recipes secret as in the past, they reach out to others to share experiences and to discuss ideas. She nurtures this interchange with her Crenn World Chef Series; she invites internationally-known chefs to join her for one or two nights in which they cook together and create a menu of dishes that inspire and reply to each other.

Answer: Norway

Maaemo, the Oslo restaurant headed and co-owned by Chef Esben Holmboe Bang, opened at the end of 2010. In 2016, the restaurant received the prestigious third Michelin star, the same year that Elite Traveler Magazine named Chef Holmboe Bang "Young Chef of the Year".

Maaemo's cuisine explores the relationship between raw nature, produce and cultural history. Two members of staff forage for herbs, berries and mushrooms in the surrounding fjords and archipelagos. The mushrooms mentioned in this quiz question are from the Telemark region in the south of Norway. The restaurant's website describes their tasting menu as offering guests "a breathtaking culinary tour of Norway". The dishes, which draw exclusively from organic, biodynamic and wild produce, are stunningly beautiful. One example is a creamy Norwegian oyster emulsion nestled in a transparent glass bowl with dots of a green sauce of mussel and dill essence providing colour.

Answer: Spain

One of the best-known Michelin three-star restaurants in Spain is Azurmendi, which opened in Larrabetzu, Spain in 2005 and received the coveted third Michelin star in 2013. The restaurant is owned by Chef Eneko Atxa, who takes traditional Basque cuisine to new levels. As his website explains they are "connecting with our roots to dream, travel, discover, feel a territory, and fly to reach the same starting point".

Chef Atxa is known for his passionate support of sustainability. In both 2014 and 2018, The World's Best 50 Restaurants organisation recognised Azurmendi as the restaurant having the highest sustainability rating, in Azurmendi's case a near perfect 93%. The philosophy of the restaurant is to integrate sustainable development and gastronomy as cultural heritage and as a right for future generations. Not only is his restaurant built of sustainable materials, but it also draws on solar and geothermic power, recycles rainwater for use in the gardens and toilets, transforms kitchen waste into fertiliser both for the restaurant's gardens and for use by local citizens, and provides electrical charging stations for guests' cars. They also created the largest seed bank in the Basque region, preserving local vegetable varieties. His vision of sustainability is not limited to the environment. His restaurant opens only two nights a week; the other days it opens only for lunch. All staff members also get one of the weekend days off. This schedule provides a better work/balance and a more sustainable lifestyle for personnel.

Answer: England

The Fat Duck, the restaurant of Chef Heston Blumenthal in Berkshire, is one of the best-known Michelin three-star restaurants in England. It opened in 1995 and has held three stars since 2004, except for one year when it closed for renovations.

Imagine having a cup of coffee that is both hot and cold at the same time, eating crab ice cream, or selecting dessert from a sort of steampunk chariot. This type of creative cuisine exemplifies the world of The Fat Duck. Blumenthal works to build the sights, smells and memories of childhood into his modernist cuisine intended to astonish and delight his guests. He was among the first to put science to work, enhancing food through the knowledge of the effects chemical and physical interactions can have in the kitchen. Although Blumenthal is closely associated with molecular gastronomy, he prefers to think of his cuisine as emotion-driven.

High-level cuisine of this kind takes time to develop. Blumenthal and his team work for months or even years in his experimental kitchen perfecting ideas for new dishes before adding them to The Fat Duck menu.

Answer: Japan

Michelin published its first guide to Tokyo restaurants in 2007. In 2011, the guide gave three stars to Usuki Fugu Yamadaya, a restaurant which specialises in fugu, the deadly pufferfish. Chef Yoshio Kusakabe serves the finest tiger pufferfish sashimi style, grilled, fried, stewed and cooked into porridge. Another speciality is a hot and sweet sake flavoured with fugu fins.

One pufferfish is said to have enough poison to kill thirty people. There is no known antidote. Training for fugu chefs requires a minimum of two years, followed by a rigorous exam before being licensed to serve this deadly delicacy. While there are periodic cases of food poisoning and even deaths from fugu poisoning, with rare exceptions these come from people preparing the dish at home.

Answer: China

When Michelin launched its guide to restaurants in Shanghai in 2017, Ultraviolet, the restaurant of Chef Paul Pairet received two stars. A year later, it received the third star. Ultraviolet offers a multi-sensory experience. Those reserving do not know the address of the restaurant; diners meet at a rendezvous point and are driven in a roundabout way to their destination. The restaurant, which has a single table for ten guests, uses music, aroma, visual projections to change the setting and mood to suit dishes of the 20-course menu. The walls are screens which might show the floor of the ocean for dishes with abalone or prawns, then change to a bonfire to accompany a course of charcoal grilled oyster, grilled foie gras and grilled cuttlefish skin. The evening is not merely a sleight of hand trick; reviews of the food indicate it is truly worthy of a three-star restaurant.

Chef Pairet describes Ultraviolet as "the crystallisation of all my experience, through a single project". It is an idea he has been working on for almost two decades.

Answer: France

I am finishing my gastronomic tour in France, at the Michelin three-star restaurant Clos de Sens, which happens to be very close to where I live.

Chef Laurent Petit opened his restaurant, Le Clos de Sens (literally the terminus of the senses) in a stone manor built in 1886, overlooking Annecy in the northern French Alps. He received his third Michelin star in 2019.

For Chef Petit, "Creativity is a state of mind, always present. Creativity is my daily bread /Creativity nourishes my daily. An object, a texture, a word, a meeting will inspire a new recipe." His cuisine is 100% local and very much lake and plant drive. He draws heavily on fish from three nearby alpine lakes, Lake Annecy, and Lake Le Bourget. Plants come both from the surrounding mountainsides and a beautiful 1500 square meter garden, one-third of which is devoted to 40 varieties of aromatics. The rest is where he and his wife grow 150 varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible flowers.

I was lucky to celebrate an anniversary at the Clos de Sens about five years before it received its third star. The memory of that meal is still very vivid in my mind, especially two dishes. The first was a small blue macaron that exploded with flavour when I bit into it. The second, one of the closing desserts, was a little fresh goat's milk cheese nestled inside an exquisite 15 cm-high transparent spun sugar inverted teardrop thinner than the most delicate glass. That is what Michelin star meals are meant to be, spectacular and memorable.