The company existed for many centuries (even before the shattering!). They call themselves Michelin and their well know guide the “Michelin Guide” (a bit on the nose but ok). They expanded their assets across the galaxy, although they have many humans in the company due to the fact that humans can consume nearly anything presented to them, they are some other cognitive species that work as Inspectors, each has been trained and tested to create extensive reports of the courses that are given to them. Wondering if is it enough to give the restaurant a star.
https://www.internationalculinarycenter.com/culinary-topics/michelin-stars/ -- Anon Guest
There is no longer one Michelin Guide. The Universe is too big and diverse for just one. There's one each for every level of Havenworlder, since it's very bad form to accidentally kill either inspector or a guest who has used said guide. There's a separate set for Deathworlders because some of them want to go looking for new and interesting poisons to try.
Deathworlders are just like that. The greater corpus of the Galactic Alliance has merely surrendered to their peculiarities and let them chase their increasingly bizarre joys. It's not entirely unheard of to hear a Ships' Human say something like, "The Michelin Guide says that they serve a curry here that almost burned their tongue off. I have got to try some!"
Then there's the guides for everyone else. They are incredibly detailed, as there are numerous ingredients or chemical compounds that many are sensitive to. The phrase, "one being's medicine is another's poison," has ever been apt when working for Michelin.
The different Mechelin guides are vaguely connected through a central database on the infonets. They did begin as one company, but the Shattering did what it did best, and dispersed varying iterations of it through time and space. Thousands of years of differing cultures created a range of evaluations.
These can start with as low a bar as "It's edible," through "The polity leader insisted with armaments that this is good," all the way to heights like, "They remembered the only One True Way to use a bendy straw." There's sixty-eight of those.
Naturally, some standards had to be set, including standards for those who were essentially held ransom pending a good review. Michelin inspectors use the phrase, "The [Polity Leader] highly recommended this restaurant to me and I could not agree more with [gender, ownerative form] opinion." That, to experienced readers, is a warning that the restaurant in question is owned by either a direct relative of the polity leader, one of their "close personal" friends, or some other form of crony in favour.
The CRC are often sent to rescue the inspector in question. Beginning every review like that for five reviews in a row, especially in conjunction with ending, "I have to give this restaurant and every dish in it the full three stars." Those are red flags that the Michelin Conglomerate is highly sensitive to. Further, those reviews are never published outside of the polity in question. The truthful ones occur after the inspector in question is safe in Alliance territory once more.
The Michelin guide exists to help travellers find the best places to eat. Points are given according to nutritional value, presentation, cleanliness of the restaurant itself, ambiance, and the relative manners of the staff. The last is awarded according to the local customs versus the Galactic Accepted Etiquette[1].
Even so, there are some places where their best is clearly not the best, but also the only option.
Welcome to Hard Grift, a world so poor that it's barely getting by. It has nothing to sell, little to grow, and the only means of income is by being one stop amongst many in a long wormhole chain between two far, far more popular places to be. Legends say it was settled by a band of Humans with a very limited diet and an even more limited understanding of things like "ecology" or "nutrition" or "soil health." They barely made it to meet up with the Alliance, but there was very little else to do but keep offering aid until some was finally accepted[2].
There, the only options are a fermented brew made out of mushrooms and a thin gruel that, after centuries of debate, the faithful were allowed to add salt to. It took a practised tongue to like either, or as the Grifted put it, appreciate their subtleties of flavour.
Hard Grift didn't have time for ambience. They barely had time for restaurants. They had seen the benefit of one smaller group doing the cooking for the larger section of workers and, since there was only one dish in the entire planet, cooking enough for everyone was simply a question of having enough people who could reliably do so.
Thus, when a Michelin inspector came to visit every single soup kitchen to partake of their Foxtail Millet and Rice gruel, they did not find a lot of ambience. They did not find a lot of presentation. They did not even find an agreeable flavour, not even with salt. The serving bowls and cutlery were carved out of stone since there was very little else that wasn't being used for other things, and the closest they could get to art was the occasional piece of graffiti on the walls.
It was a meal in which finding weevils was a nutritional bonus.
There was very little positive to say about it, about any of it, anywhere on Hard Grift. Nevertheless, Inspector Vance took one look at the struggling state of this world and decided that the best way to help them all out was to try their hardest.
They would only get one star, but one star was still a prize to be valued. Inspector Vance picked the soup kitchen in the poorest part of the planet, and give it the most glowing review they could.
Though this unique delicacy is all over Hard Grift, this author finds this particular kitchen to be a superb example, they began. They made sure to add an entirely spurious custom of tipping the overworked staff generously, and twisted the truth to the breaking point.
By the time their review would come under re-evaluation, Inspector Vance hoped, Hard Grift would be in a much better standing.
[1] Whilst table manners vary wildly between planets, and so does the definition of 'cutlery', it is generally acceptable to avoid deliberately offending your guests.
[2] It's all very well claiming that the human body only needs beans, rice, and kombocha, for example, but even soils meant to grow those crops can become poisoned by them in the fullness of time. By the time the Alliance found Hard Grift, the crops they were growing had left a significant portion of land mass as a dust bowl, and the surviving citizens adamant about maintaining their honoured traditions.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / kamontad123]
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