Culinary pride or postcolonial permission? Deconstructing the Michelin moment

Nine Philippine restaurants have just earned Michelin stars - our first in history. The announcement electrified social media and dominated headlines: Filipino cuisine has finally arrived.

- SHARED VALUES RON F. JABAL

But through a postcolonial lens, that statement itself demands interrogation: arrived where, and according to whom? Why does our sense of arrival still depend on acknowledgment from the West? The Michelin Guide, a 125-year-old French institution, is perhaps the most powerful arbiter of global taste. To earn a star is to be canonized into a system that has defined and refined the world's culinary hierarchies for more than a century. It is both validation and assimilation, a moment of triumph that also mirrors our lingering colonial anxieties.

The Michelin system was born in early-20th century France, in the same cultural space that produced haute cuisine: a model of dining built on hierarchy, precision, and ritual. The star system was never neutral; it encoded an aesthetic of refinement rooted in European values of control, exclusivity, and restraint.

When Filipino restaurants such as, among others, Helm, Toyo Eatery, Gallery by Chele, or Hapag succeed within this framework, they are not only cooking; they are performing legibility to a Western system of evaluation.

The degustation format, the choreography of service, the minimalist plating, the architecture of silence are signatures of an imported language of taste.

We begin to see not only the creativity and technical mastery of our chefs, but also the enduring power of colonial frameworks to define what counts as "excellent."

This does not diminish the achievement of our chefs; on the contrary, it highlights their brilliance in navigating and subverting these codes. But it also reminds us that the Michelin model remains a gatekeeper of global culinary prestige, one that privileges form over soul, ritual over chaos, and often Western definitions of refinement over local expressions of authenticity.

THE POLITICS OF TASTE