Awards, has your business won one? They are a fact of life for businesses of all types and a useful tool in so many ways. Incentives for staff and business owners alike, a great marketing tool for the winners, and always good for a night out on the town and a reason to get dressed up. But are they worth it and how accurate are they?
In the hospitality business there are lots of them and many of them are of course well known. The main and most prestigious protagonists are of course Michelin and the AA here in the UK, there are currently, and have been in the past, many others but these are probably the best known and most prolific.
Michelin, the Holy Grail of accolades has led the field for a very long time now, I won my first Michelin star for my food back in 1981, at the time there were only 32 in the UK, now, considerably more! I achieved my first AA Rosette, (Michelin have Stars, up to a maximum of three and the AA Rosettes, these used to be a maximum of three but that is now five), the previous year. This was because the AA guide came out in the September while the Michelin Guide was published at the end of January. On the face of it these were a year apart the reality was that they were only four months apart. Michelin have always been seen to be more prestigious than the AA, firstly there are a lot fewer Michelin Starred establishments, mainly because their standards are so much higher than those of the AA. Those that have them desperately want to keep them as they are members of an exclusive club. Those that are looking to gain one work extremely hard, with so few actually managing to attain the ultimate prize. The numbers of those that have stars are growing all the time, I fervently hope this is because the standards are improving across the board at a greater rate than the stars are being attained but the number of three starred establishments remains tantalisingly small.
Look at the AA Rosettes though and you see a totally different picture, it seems so very easy to attain the lower one Rosette standard as there are just so many. I had it in my head to count them to emphasise the difference between the two publications but the list is so long that I gave up, there are just not enough hours in the day! Even the list of two and three Rosettes winners is huge. It is usually recognised that three AA Rosettes is almost equivalent to one Michelin Star but that is not always an accurate comparison.
The trouble with the AA was highlighted to me recently when the new AA Restaurant Guide was published for 2023. I read of one recipient who proudly announced his achievement on social media, and rightly so, that he had at last attained three AA Rosettes, well done that man and his team. The problem however was that he said it was his first inspection for five years. Which then begs the question, how reliable are these awards and therefore what value can we place on them? I recently sold my small restaurant with rooms, we held four Gold Stars for our rooms/service/ambience from both the AA and Visit Scotland, they both claim to operate to the same judging criteria, we also held two AA Rosettes for our food, we too had not been inspected for four years. The people that bought the business from me were not capable of attaining two Rosettes, sorry but that is the way it is, the food would be okay but not award winning. They still hold the two Rosettes and the four Gold Stars from the AA, why? because they would still not have been inspected since they took over making it 6 years since the last inspection even though I wrote and told them we were selling.
As Marco Pierre White said when he gave up on his Michelin Stars saying he no longer wanted to be part of the game “Once you accept you are being judged by people who have less knowledge than yourself, then what’s it worth.” Beware of believing everything you read!