Wheel comes off Guide Michelin

Another Spanish cook blames his star;

Julio Biosca put up with the pressure for four years. Then, in the summer of 2013, as he was celebrating his birthday at a highly reputed restaurant, he saw a waiter approach his table with a little spray bottle, and he feared the worst.

“And now,” said the waiter, his finger poised over the nozzle, “our sherry aroma.”

The restaurant had one Michelin Star, just as his did.

It was a turning point. “I felt I wanted to get away from all this,” he recalls, sitting inside his own restaurant.

He and his partner wrote to the Michelin guide, requesting to drop out of the list. The email apparently never arrived, and Casa Julio once again received a star in 2014.

Star-crossed lover of food. Could be worse;

...practically none of these restaurants are profitable. Ferran Adrià, Spain’s foremost kitchen guru, once revealed that he was losing as much as half a million euros a year at elBulli, the world-famous restaurant that became a place of pilgrimage for global food lovers.

As Pascal Rémy, a former inspector for the Michelin Guide with 16 years’ experience, explained in his insider book L’inspecteur se met à table (or ,The inspector sits down at the table), any restaurant that gets this distinction bestowed upon it “is going to need more money.”