At any rate, the Michelin guides have stirred up a lot of discussion in Asian gastronomic circles and have made people reconsider the conditions necessary for gourmet cuisine as well as the triangular relationship between restaurants, food critics, and culinary culture.

Flip through the Michelin Guide: Hong Kong and Macau 2009, and you'll discover that the 251 selected restaurants cover a wide range of cooking styles-from Cantonese and other kinds of Chinese food to various foreign cuisines. But when you peruse the passages on Chinese restaurants, you can indeed detect a certain French perspective in the evaluations. For instance, in its discussion of the Cantonese one-star restaurant Hutong, the guide emphasizes: "All carved antique wood, silk curtains, red lanterns and cozy alcoves with doors from traditional hutong houses. ... including a lot of offal and some other pretty unusual ingredients. A hip destination, the waiters can be just too cool and trendy to smile."

Chinese tend to care purely about the food. Michelin, on the other hand, prefers dining experiences that are pleasing to all five senses. Consequently, it tends to favor restaurants in tourist hotels. The photo shows the classical dining environment at Silks Palace, a restaurant at the National Palace Museum.

French chauvinism?

Of the more than 10,000 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macao only Lung King Heen in Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel and the French restaurant Robuchon a Galera in Macao's Hotel Lisboa earned three stars, note Hong Kong critics, and restaurants in tourist hotels comprised half of all listings. These locals lambaste the guide for "putting the entire focus on high-end restaurants and overlooking traditional Chinese restaurants" and also for "employing only one local among the four critics who made evaluations."

The Taiwanese food critic Ann Hu holds a different view. In her mind, there's nothing wrong with being concerned about a restaurant's environment and atmosphere, and the employment of "too few Chinese critics" is not valid grounds for criticism. Ultimately, the guides are assessments by foreigners for foreign tourists, she says. The key concern should be whether the guides convey a deep understanding of Chinese food. "Apart from sour, sweet, bitter, hot and salty, Chinese cooking also includes various complex flavors, such as qiang (raw-marinated), fu (fermented), and zi (pickled). Foreigners may not even be accustomed to these flavors, let alone possess the expertise to offer competent evaluations of them.

On the other hand, Chua Lam, a Hong Konger who has led restaurant tours of Taiwan, pulls no punches. He describes Michelin's Hong Kong guide as "ridiculous," arguing that "a basic requirement of a critic ought to be fluency in the local language and long-term residency." He believes that every place has its own unique cuisine, and that it's impossible to make these varied forms of gastronomy conform to a single set of standards. One shouldn't try to rank restaurants, he believes. Rather, all that one can shoot for is building "mutual trust" between the guide and the guided.

Gourmet information explosion

There are some basic underlying differences between Chinese and Western culinary traditions. Moreover, the dependent relationship between French restaurant culture and its system of food criticism is rooted in France's unique history and culture. (See "The Love-Hate Relationship Between French Food Critics and Chefs.") In the United States, The New York Times greatly increased its food coverage in the 1960s, when it started to publish restaurant reviews in imitation of those in the Michelin guides. At the same time, it also began to treat food as a cultural phenomenon, actively introducing African-American "soul food," and the cuisines of Asia and Mexico. Restaurant reviews in The New York Times-like its reviews of Broadway plays-are still eagerly awaited by industry insiders, gourmands and cultural observers.

So what about food criticism here in Taiwan? Is there a system in place to assess the quality of the island's restaurants? And what standards are or should be used?

In newspapers, culinary magazines, and food shows in Taiwan, you'll find headlines such as "Good Food: Needed Fuel for Your Shopping Expedition," "Discussion of New Eateries and Analysis of What Makes a Famous Restaurant," "Budget-Friendly High-Quality Cuisine," and "Exploring the Gourmet Cuisine of Mysterious Realms." There is information overload, and a motley crew of would-be authorities, from food beat reporters pounding their chests as they make their guarantees, to taxi drivers, spouses and student bloggers. But widespread suspicions about payoffs for coverage make it hard for the food media to establish credibility.

In Chinese cuisine a premium is put on cutting and heat control, as well as high-heat stir-frying, and other cooking and steaming methods. The photo shows cooks at Yin Yih concentrating on doing their individual tasks.

The makings of a good restaurant

While most food reporting targets common food rather than high cuisine and aims to satisfy consumers' preference for what's currently in vogue, Gastronomy magazine's Taipei's Top Restaurants guide, which follows Michelin's practice of using anonymous critics, highlights true uniqueness. Gastronomy has great ambitions for a series of such guides. It published a Taichung guide last year and plans to issue a Kaohsiung guide sometime in 2009.

Gastronomy's CEO Jiao Tong, who has had a long career in literature and media, emphasizes that food isn't all that makes a good restaurant. Rather, fine dining requires combining a high level of culinary skills with an elegant dining space and outstanding service, as well as an unrelenting concern for hygiene. Yet, once an eatery or restaurant starts to do well in Taiwan, the proprietors often become arrogant and forget that they are working in a service industry. They frown and toss dishes onto tables. For the most part, the customers meekly hang their heads and eat the food. It seems that as long as the food is tasty, Taiwan's restaurant-goers are satisfied. They are not inclined to make extravagant demands for anything else.

"Taste is always paramount, but current international standards for gourmet food also include concerns about using top-quality produce, protecting local food production, and paying attention to the food's visual and olfactory joys." Jiao Tong cites the restaurant C'est Bon, which offers creative takes on fusion cuisine and has earned three stars in Taipei's Top Restaurants for two years running. In her quest for natural, pure flavors, C'est Bon's head chef Ah-Jiao rents a piece of land in Su'ao to grow labor-intensive Hoya rice. She and her staff use cold spring water for irrigation and ducks for pest control. As an added benefit, the duck droppings fertilize the soil. In such a manner, the restaurant cultivates hardier plants and tastier rice.

Or, take the Shi-Yang Culture Restaurant, which is set in a garden in the Yangming Mountains. Its commodious and atmospheric dining space is decorated simply and traditionally with bamboo blinds, long wooden tables, lanterns, and tatami mats. Outside, the mountains, plants and white clouds combine to create wonderful vistas. The food presentation and the service are imbued with a Zen sense of being and nothingness, of ebb and flow-so that diners experience a "baptism of the spirit."

Jiao Tong admits that after he published his "poetry collection" The Complete Cookbook for Fortifying the Masculine Force of Yang, he was "mistaken for" a food expert, and restaurants often invited him to "test" their food. "Because I'll do anything not to lose face, I had to at least acquire a little common knowledge about food." Today, he's hooked, and he can't run away from gastronomy-whether in his educational and publishing careers or in his personal life.

Redefining gourmet food

Jiao Tong explains: "We want to define the 'new Taiwanese restaurant' by holding strictly to the highest standards for everything from the food itself, to the ambiance of the surroundings, to the pacing of the courses, to the creative use of ingredients. We don't just want to attract urbanites to take time out from their busy lives; we also want them to proudly recommend the restaurant to visitors from abroad."

Back in 2005, Hsieh Chung-tao, a young food reporter who resides in France, began to probe "the dark face" of Taiwanese food culture by contrasting it unflatteringly with French gastronomy and its "slow-food ethos." For instance, he argued that restaurant reviews in Taiwan, if not virtual advertisements, essentially treat restaurants as places where one goes to be fashionable. Meanwhile, consumers often eat without chewing and expect service to be "familiar" rather than "professional." The use of processed flavorings such as MSG and sugar substitutes dulls taste sensitivity. And chefs, who should be the souls of their restaurants, are treated like cogs in moneymaking machines. Rarely can they develop a distinct personal style.

Interestingly, the publication of Hsieh's Bon Appetit elicited widely differing reactions. A certain crowd on the Internet self-righteously attacked him for his "French chauvinism" or for "holding up French court food to attack Taiwanese street food while intentionally giving short shrift to gourmet Taiwanese food." On the other hand, some young chefs wrote to him again and again, passionately describing their thoughts about the potential for a more professional gastronomic culture here.

Then, in July of the same year the Chinese Gastronomical Promotion Association held Taiwan's first "Gourmet Summit" at the instigation of Landis Hotel president Stanley C. Yen, inviting more than 100 food luminaries and professionals. The meeting revealed concerns that the very pillars of Chinese cuisine were shaking because of the foreign-food invasion. Those in attendance offered numerous suggestions, such as fostering a greater sense of honor among restaurants and chefs, treasuring local ingredients and flavorings, and building an authoritative system of food criticism.

"Food of the common people"-wonderfully various and available anywhere and anytime-serves as the foundation of Taiwan's food culture. But "comprehensive standards for gourmet food cannot rely upon the lowest level of common snacks or home-style appetizers," says food reporter Hsieh Chung-tao, who lives in France. "To become gourmet cuisine, food needs to stand tests of profound implications, the application of artistic genius, and the tempering of time."

Judging skills

Yet how, amid the multitude of restaurants, can one find the few that are truly outstanding? "Food criticism is in fact a high-cost, crazy line of work," as Jiao Tong puts it.

Take, for instance, the second edition of Taipei's Top Restaurants, which was published last year. First, a committee of about a dozen gourmands compiled a list of more than 300 recommended restaurants from among the more than 10,000 in the Taipei area. Then a committee of seven anonymous critics took a "carpet-bombing" approach to their task. Each of the critics had to eat at and give separate assessments for 200 restaurants in one year (each received a "symbolic" stipend of NT$100,000). Scoring components included food (50%), service (20%), general environment (15%), price (10%), and alcohol or drinks (5%). Points would be deducted for poor hygiene. Eventually, a general score for each restaurant was figured by averaging the scores of the individual critics.

Jiao Tong acknowledges he made a big mistake the first year: Unintentionally, he set up the committee like those that award prizes for books. "For literary prizes, the process is one where committee members try to convince each other of their opinions and work toward compromise. More emphasis is put on exchanging views than on compiling scores." In the first year the judges varied widely in their tastes and knowledge, and they constantly bickered. Then Jiao Tong made an even bigger mistake: He tried to resolve disputes by inviting the judges to return to certain restaurants and reassess them. But the restaurant staffs immediately figured out who they were and what they were doing.

For the second year, Jiao Tong replaced the entire slate of critics. The new critics individually communicated with the "spymaster," as he calls himself. "It totally resembled the methods used by intelligence agencies." Moreover, half of the judges were entrepreneurs: "They may have even more knowledge in the field than food critics and can take a more international perspective."

Originally, Michelin, a French company with 100 years of history, offered road guides with information about restaurants and hotels to its customers free of charge. It now publishes authoritative guides to restaurants in 23 countries, and last year it formally entered the realm of Chinese cuisine with a guide to Hong Kong and Macao. Ultimately, what conditions are necessary for gourmet dining? Who should judge? And should different standards be used to judge Chinese, as opposed to Western, cuisine?

The secrets of food critics

Apart from the critics at Gastronomy magazine, some senior columnists and food reporters have also paid anonymous visits to restaurants in the interest of offering fairer assessments. Most people might believe that having to try excellent food for your job would be like a blessing from heaven. Yet the food reporters and critics all complain about it.

In the preface to Next magazine's first compilation of its food criticism-2009 Restaurant Reviews from Next Magazine-Pan Bingxin, the deputy editor-in-chief for travel and food, bemoaned the grind of searching for the hottest text and photos every week. The space can't go empty, and it's got to prove to be both a critical and financial success. The pressure is enough to take all enjoyment out of eating food, he says, to the point where he has even had nightmares about being "drowned in food." Occupational hazards for food reporters include gastroenteritis, food poisoning, and weight gain. Quite often, after an intensive report on a certain kind of food, a terrified-looking writer will say, "Please, I beg you: don't ask me to eat that again for at least another year!"

And yet, when they want to be energized or need inspiration, the same writers will "eagerly eat at those street stalls where old masters have presided for decades," immersing themselves in the "perseverance, self-control and passion" displayed by those chefs.

In 2007, the Corporate Synergy Development Center, which is supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, sent staff on an investigative trip to France. Their report concluded that the level of hygiene at Taiwan's restaurants posed an obstacle to the internationalization of Taiwanese gourmet cuisine. Within international society, the main impression about Taiwanese food is that it is "cheap but inelegant." The plastic dinnerware and disposable chopsticks this hotpot restaurant uses may keep this hotpot restaurant from getting the acclaim that its delicious food deserves.

Creating our own Michelin

Ideally, a food critic is part detective and part artist. Criticism can lead to changes in the speed and direction of consumer culture, but food criticism is only a part of what is needed to raise the restaurant culture here.

Ann Hu, who has been writing articles about food for more than 20 years and has frequently served as a judge at culinary competitions, believes that looking for a Michelin for Taiwan isn't the only way for the island to ascend to the international gastronomical stage. Another approach would be to invite food experts from around the world to come to Taiwan for an anonymous challenge of Chinese cuisine. If foreign judges ate something they were particularly impressed by, they would naturally spread the word. What's more, the government could provide professional training for waiters, encourage improvements in hygiene, increase knowledge among the general public about ingredients and the art of cooking, and hold a greater variety of food activities. (Why, for instance, are beef noodles the only food that Taipei celebrates with a festival?)

At any rate, the search for Taiwan's Michelin is not merely about trying to find a system of food criticism suited to Taiwan. It also involves changing attitudes about food and raising taste levels. Only by so doing can Taiwan's already delicious food change for the better and grow with the times.

For a restaurant, winning the heart of a customer is like gaining a lifetime soul mate-the joy from it far exceeds mere monetary gain.