Michelin Guide 2007: France's Best
2007 France Michelin Guide Selects Best Hotels and Restaurants
Love it or hate it, you can't ignore the Michelin Guide. Its 2007 France edition picks the country's best hotels and restaurants, including 26 with 3 Michelin Stars
Is this the best guidebook to France? Well, it depends what you want but for travelers who love their French food and want to be sure their hotel is going to be comfortable, there is nothing quite like the big red Michelin Guide to France.
If you want to know about museums, cathedrals and practical matters like opening hours, you need to buy the various Michelin Green Guides. That series is the more conventional guidebook series, from a company whose name now has the strange distinction of being as well-known for grading restaurants as it is for selling tyres.
Michelin really has no rival for what it does. There are other food guides, yes, and many say that Michelin is over-rated. But it has been in the business of grading restaurants and hotels the longest, and its name is known worldwide for rating the world's top restaurants, whether it be France, London, New York, San Francisco or (soon) Tokyo. The accolade of Three Michelin Stars is what most chefs dream of, and here in this massive book of over 2000 pages covering every corner of France, only 26 restaurants make the top grade.
To see which ten restaurants can claim to be the best in Paris for 2007, read the review of the Michelin Paris Guide 2007 by clicking here. Another 16 restaurants around the country make the grade – not another 16 chefs because Alain Ducasse manages the unique feat yet again of winning three stars in two different kitchens, at the Plaza Athenee in Paris and his original Le Louis XV-Alain Ducasse in Monte Carlo.
From Abbeville to Zoufftgen, and with diversions to Monaco and Andorra, the renowned Michelin inspectors have been sampling the steaks, sipping the Sancerre and testing the softness of the sheets in more than 5100 hotels and 3600 restaurants throughout France. Addresses, emails, prices, descriptions, locations – the monumental task of putting together the information has been carried out.
Every town and city of any size has a detailed street map too – some, like Lyon, might have several. Every establishment is marked on the map and cross-referenced to the text. It's truly a colossal task, the French traveler's equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You don't have to agree with the Michelin Guide in order to admire it. Some people even collect them, like they collect Baedeker Guides, as a historical record, year-by-year.
If you want to have breakfast in Bordeaux, lunch in Lens, dinner in Dijon, supper in St-Etienne or bed down for the night in Beaune, there isn't a better traveling companion than the Michelin Guide to France. It's a feast of a book.
The Michelin Guide France 2007 costs £15.99 in the UK. Visit the Michelin website here.
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