Michelin boosts female chefs in 2019 guide

An unprecedented number of restaurants run by female chefs won plaudits in the new French edition of the Michelin food guide released Monday, as the guardians of haute cuisine sought to address a glaring gender imbalance. Eleven female-led restaurants have been added to the 2019 guide to the best food in France, out of a record 75 new additions bestowed with one, two or three Michelin stars.

Among them was 24-year-old wunderkind Julia Sedefdjian, who won a star for her new restaurant Baieta, while Stephanie Le Quellec claimed her second for Parisian restaurant La Scene. The guide’s new international director Gwendal Poullennec had promised to breathe new life into its pages this year, celebrating young talent as well as female chefs. A large number of international chefs are also honoured -- many of them Japanese -- while Argentine Mauro Colagreco became the only foreigner to currently hold three stars in France. “So many emotions.

Thank you! I’m so honoured,” said the 42-year-old, whose Mirazur restaurant on the glitzy French Riviera ranked fourth last year on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Chef Laurent Petit meanwhile praised the feared Michelin reviewers for having “the sense” to award him a third star for Le Clos des Sens restaurant in Annecy. “I’m delighted to have won a third star with endive roots and a cabbage tart. Simple, simple, simple,” he said. In one of the biggest shocks, renowned Alpine chef Marc Veyrat lost his third star, along with the Auberge de L’Ill, a restaurant in Alsace that had held three stars for 51 years.

“It’s hard for the team, it’s hard for everyone -- the customers, the family,” its chef Marc Haeberlin told France 3 Alsace television. “I don’t know how to explain this loss,” said Haeberlin, whose family has run an inn in Alsace for 150 years. Veyrat, known as much for his trademark wide-brimmed black hat as his love of mountain herbs, said he was “terribly disappointed” that his restaurant the Maison des Bois had been downgraded. “I can’t understand it at all,” said Veyrat, blasting the decision as “unfair”.