First of all you need to know some facts: I'm 28 29 years old, jobless and swimming in debt. The only trade for which I have ever shown any aptitude is dying as sure as that of the dodo hunter. Every time I lower my expectations of what job I can realistically hope to find, I am met with yet more disappointment. I have no home; I do have a fiancée. Overall, if you look at things in the wrong light, you could say I am lost in a great desert of shit.
And yet.
And yet, on the other hand, I have a ludicrous lifestyle that if I were anyone but me, I'd envy. It's a lifestyle that has taken me to every continent on Earth in the last three years, swaggering around in a fashion that would normally be the reserve of millionaires. At a conservative estimate, I'd say that since November 2008, if you totalled up everything - every flight, meal, drink, hotel room, cruise etc and so on - I'd guess I've had about £150,000 of freebies. In the words of Withnail: "Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can't."
I don't mind saying that as a broke scheme rat, it's one of my major motivations for travelling. Learning about new cultures, seeing and doing the unimaginable – all that shit is fine, but the fact that I so very rarely have to put my hand in my pocket makes it all the more satisfying.
But it's not all free on this current trip to France: nope this time I'm genuinely having to spend quite a lot of money to, if not make money, then just about finish all square.
So why do it?
Well, despite eating in some truly outstanding restaurants over the last few years, Wee Mo and I have never eaten in a Michelin-starred restaurant. This is mostly down to one of the great myths that surrounds the Michelin Guide: people often think, erroneously, that it is a global arbitrator. It's not – not anything like it in fact. The Michelin Guide has taken its stars to just 14 countries around the world, plus most of the major cities around Europe and a handful in the States.
It makes a bit of a mockery of their fine dining coverage: yes they inspect thousands of restaurants a year, but, for example D.O.M in Sao Paulo is frequently heralded as the finest restaurant in all of South America, but the Guide has never been there so, Michelin terms, it's on a par with my local chippy. Worse, the Guide isn't even in major cities with very obvious fine dining scenes: cities like Melbourne, Shanghai, Singapore, Cape Town and, to a greatly reduced extent, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
The reasons why they haven't expanded is too dull to go into in detail here but I once interviewed the Director of the guides who said the criteria are: the presence of at least one three-star (their highest rating) restaurant; the competition of existing guides; and the likelihood of selling more tyres.
Because there's another thing you might not know: the fat fucking idiot tyre man, Bibendum, is absolutely the same person who judges (some of) the world's fine food. There's no shame if you didn't know that: for a very long time, I pronounced the tyre brand “mitch-e-linn”, as though I was talking to a spanner-wielding grease monkey; meanwhile, when talking about posh food, I'd refer to “meesh-lun”, in a hideous, nasal way designed to bum a French Maitre D.
But it's all one and the same thing: Andre and Eduoard Michelin released the first guide in 1900 to encourage people to get out and about on France's roads. The logic was that if people saw more of a reason to buy a car, they'd need more tyres – Michelin tyres. The ploy worked, and by the 1930s it wasn't just a guide to France, but a judgement on the nation's dining scene. As the tyre business was now well established, Michelin could afford for the inspectors to travel to restaurants and pay for their meals, judging anonymously (the rest of the review industry was, at one time or another, populated by chancing c***s like me).
So that's why people give a shit: because, in theory at least, Michelin are unimpeachable, and they really, really know what they're talking about (I'll explain that later).
 |
| Photo: Wee Mo |
 |
| Photo: Wee Mo |
It's not unreasonable, then, to expect that a French chef with a star, must be a happy man – especially when he owns his own restaurant in the heart of Basque country and he's so handsome it's hard to match his gaze.
So, whoo-fucking-hoo? I say to Cedric Bechade, the handsome bastard in question.
The chef looks at me, frowns and shrugs with deep Gallic disdain: “They give me a star, they don't give me a star, the people still come,” he says in heavily accented English. “I don't cook for them, I cook for my customers. Some chefs think: 'Guide, Guide, Guide'; I think: 'customers, customers, customers.'”
Just for a second, everything I think I understand about Michelin as an institution wavers. To me, shrugging off the Guide's decree is the culinary equivalent of listening to Einstein's theory of relativity and saying: “Well everyone's entitled to their opinion.”
How much is typical French arrogance and how much it's genuine apathy is hard to tell, but I get the impression that, with only one star, then maybe it's more of the latter. And the food? Well it's fine. Totally unspectacular, but still an interesting mix of French and Spanish influences. We know immediately that we've had a lot better else where. But this is only lunch, and there's no wine to pair with it: a Michelin inspector would come at dinner and order the sprawling taster menu (one of their inspecting rules is that they must order the maximum number of courses available.) It's really not that expensive either: lunch is around €30.
We quickly leave after our brief chat and drive through the glorious Basque countryside to the seaside town of Biarritz. Ordinarily with a trip like this, I'd contact a tourist board do most of the work for me, but the French tourist board were genuinely less helpful than their Kazakh equivalents – and that was a portakabin maintained by a goat. So for a month before flying, I found myself stuck in front of a computer badgering restaurants and hotels to, y'know, get the free stuff out. In every instance, I went for the best that money could buy.
 |
| Photo: Wee Mo |
The first hotel is fit for an emperor – literally: the Hotel Du Palais was built by Napoleon III as a summer house for his beach-loving wife Eugenie in the mid 19th century. For the past 130 years or so it's been a hotel. And if you like nursing homes then boy! this the place for you. Unnecessarily, they give us a junior suite which represents truly woeful value at €800 a night. The sea view – the room hangs over the beach – is impossible to beat, but the room itself is gloomy, and despite its high ceiling, strangely stuffy. I'm not suggesting for a second that it would be better if it was Ikea'd, but something about it definitely put me in mind of adult nappies, senile screaming and prolapsed colons. And freebie or not, no one wants that.
 |
| Photo: Wee Mo |
Next time: Bordeaux and La Rochelle