Mark your calendars. We finally know when Florida restaurants will get Michelin stars
Miami, you officially have a date with the Michelin Guide.
The world’s premier restaurant guide book, which ranks dining spots with its coveted stars, will reveal Florida’s honored locations in June, a Michelin spokesperson told the Miami Herald.
Michelin Guide usually announces its new restaurants in late April or May, and the organization originally floated a Spring 2022 announcement. But a Michelin spokesperson said the announcement for the new Florida guide will come during a live ceremony June 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes.
The state’s tourism agency, Visit Florida, announced a deal in November 2021 to bring the Michelin Guide to Florida. The state agency partnered with local tourism boards in Miami, Orlando and Tampa to have the cities included in the new guide.
Each pitched in to pay Michelin as much as $1.5 million over the next three years to produce a Florida guide. Miami’s tourism agency, the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, said it expected to pay “in line” with about $116,000 a year for the next three years to help offset the cost of producing the Michelin Guide for Miami-Dade County.
“What we want to do is help one of our most important industries,” GMCVB’s CEO Rolando Aedo told the Miami Herald in November.
However, the actual contracts Michelin has with local tourism agencies may never be seen. Aedo said that even though the GMCVB receives millions of public dollars from tourism taxes, its contract with Michelin is not public record, and he declined to share it at the time. Non-disclosure agreements with each of the local organizations are in place, he said.
The Michelin Guide, founded in France in the late 1880s, is the world’s largest and best-known restaurant rating system, bringing international prestige to those establishments on which it confers its stars. Renowned in Europe, the guide is found in only four American metro areas: Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and all of California.
Visit California paid the Michelin Guide $600,000 to expand beyond the Bay Area to the rest of the state in 2019, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The GMCVB quoted research that showed a bump in international visitors in each of the cities where Michelin debuted, Aedo has said.
During the June announcement, Michelin Guide will announce which Florida restaurants received one to three stars, which were named Bib Gourmand, denoting those that serve good food at an affordable price, or Plate, restaurants that “simply serve good food,” according the Michelin website.
The guide, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, rates more than 40,000 establishments across 24 territories and three continents.
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 3:44 PM with the headline "Mark your calendars. We finally know when Florida restaurants will get Michelin stars."
