Why a tire company is the judge of fine dining

Wholeheartedly agree. I went to a three star restaurant in San Francisco called Benu. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and worth every penny.

Would I ever do it again? No. But it was definitely worth doing once. It's the food equivalent of going to Disney.

Michelins can cover such a broad range of cuisines and offer wildly differing dining experiences, it would seem silly to club them all with the same tired trope truncheon.

One I always wish I'd gotten to is Fäviken in the north of Sweden, but now sadly closed.

I suspect, but without any proof or real knowledge of it, that he evolution of paid time off (les vacances) in combination with the democratization of the car greatly participated to the success of the Michelin Guide. This also partly reflect on the original meaning of the star system:

• One star: worth the stop
• Two stars: worth the detour
• Three stars: worth the trip

I am surprised to learn that the only Michelin restaurants in the US are in NYC, Chicago, D.C. and San Francisco.

It is perhaps surprising because it isn't true. There are restaurants with Michelin stars in Los Angeles, and in San Diego.

The Michelin Guide is more properly a series of guides, with different scopes, perhaps better understood as the physical paper guidebooks that are still released. Within Europe, there are guides at a country level, and more detailed guides for some cities; outside Europe, guides are mostly only for specific cities, with the recent and unusual exception of California, starting in 2019. There are no stars given outside those areas (though I'm aware of some that only very loosely could be considered to be in the cities they were listed in), not because there are not good restaurants, but because there isn't a guide covering them, and inspectors aren't sent. There have been suggestions that different guides can also have different standards, preferences, and styles: I remember accusations that the Tokyo standards were too lenient, and that the New York prose was too purple.

If the video said otherwise---I strongly dislike the current popularity of using video as a medium needlessly, and so haven't watched it---then it may be outdated, as there was a gap until recently when Los Angeles had no guide. But if so, it also omits the rather interesting story of why Michelin left LA, at some point in the early 2000s, it I recall correctly. Michelin was elitist; LA's culinary culture was elitist; but these were distinct elitisms. So far from being a prestigious distinction locally, LA's food critics and foodies sneered at Michelin as an outdated and undiscerning supporter of ostentatious mediocrity and the passé. It was eventually driven out of the city, with its remains being a few restaurants that continued to note their stars that had never actually been taken away, until at some point many of those restaurants had closed, or changed entirely.

When Michelin recently returned, it was as an all-California guide, perhaps as a way of trying to avoid a repeat of this experience.

I don't think they send out judges past a certain selection of cities. There isn't a single Michelin star amongst all of Canada. Not a single star for any restaurant in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, one of those fancy hotels in Quebec City. We'd probably have a fair amount of at least 1-stars if they came up, but they don't send people up so we don't.