The term “five stars” stands for the best of the best. It’s the highest possible rating on e-commerce sites like Amazon and Wayfair. It’s the best review you can give a song on Apple Music. The highest military rank in many countries? That’s right five-star general. Somehow we’ve all accepted five as the ideal number of stars. Well we all have except the restaurant industry.
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What “Michelin Star Restaurant” Really Means
The most prestigious rating system in the world of food is the Michelin Guide a travel guide published by the French tire company of the same name. The Michelin star system asks whether a restaurant is worth visiting. A one-star restaurant is worth a stop if you’re in the area a three-star restaurant is worth traveling to another country for and a five-star restaurant… doesn’t exist. The Michelin Guide only goes up to three stars.
When people talk about a star rating system for restaurants they probably think of the Michelin Guide. In that sense there’s no such thing as a five-star restaurant but who says Michelin has to be the ultimate authority on food? The guides only cover 37 countries excluding many types of world cuisines and in the age of the internet a whole new crop of rating systems have emerged with a much broader reach (and a few extra stars to boot).
Star ratings originated outside of the restaurant industry. They were first used for hotels and tourist destinations during the Golden Age of Travel in the early 19th century when steam trains and ocean liners made mass leisure travel possible for the first time. English travel writer Mariana Starke coined the concept in her 1820 book Travels on the Continent in which she classified notable works of art with exclamation points rather than stars. The first use of a star system is credited to German Karl Baedeker who began publishing travel guides in 1827. He did not use five stars however. Instead he gave exceptional hotels one star to set them apart from the rest. Top tourist destinations were given two stars but that was it.
