It is a black and white, inarguable fact that Seattle has no Michelin-starred restaurants. That is not an opinion nor a judgment of the quality of dining out around here: In order to get a Michelin star, a restaurant must be included in the Michelin guide, and as of right now, the company does not publish one that includes Seattle.

What is an opinion—and one I hold as a fervent booster of Seattle’s restaurant scene and someone who has spent the last two decades writing about it—is that Seattle shouldn’t have Michelin star restaurants.

Not because I don’t think our restaurants deserve the love and accolades, but because the lack of Michelin stars in Seattle has absolutely nothing to do with our reputation nor our food scene—I’m confident we can compete with St. Pete-Clearwater, Florida, for example, on both counts.

Seattle doesn’t have a Michelin Guide because the guide is a pay-to-play private publication. California paid $600,000 to get a statewide guide in 2019 and Florida paid $1.5 million in 2022 (but only for cities that ponied up). Rumors abound about the price tag for bringing in the guide—that Bangkok paid $4.4 million for five years, Vancouver even more. Seattle has far better and smarter ways it could and should spend that kind of money on its local restaurants.

Today, the Seattle Times published an op-ed to the contrary, that, per the headline, "Seattle restaurants should shoot for the (Michelin Guide) stars.” The author, Chris Costa, begins with an appeal that plays to the public’s naivete about how the sausage is made, saying, “Their restaurant guide reviewers haven’t made their way here despite Seattle’s reputation as a serious food city,” before making, essentially, the same argument a Michelin guide sales pitch might: Spending the money will increase culinary tourism and garner a good return on investment. Maybe it would—Costa does not offer any concrete numbers, but vaguely waves at self-reported positive comments from the entities responsible for the budgets that allocated the money in those cities.

The more important point is this: That same amount of money could also be used on a solution that helps build a stable dining scene for both locals and visitors. Bringing the Michelin Guide in as a solution to the woes facing our restaurant industry is some pathetic Reagan-era, trickle-down economics for the tasting-menu crowd. 

As for anecdotal evidence? Mexico City recently paid its share on a Michelin Guide, so I asked Anais Martinez, who spends her days talking to culinary tourists as owner of food tour company Devoured, if she thought it was worth it. “Not really,” she says. Michelin listed mostly the same restaurants that appeared on all the other lists, and both of the two-star restaurants, Pujol and Quintonil, regularly top various rankings. (No restaurants in Mexico have received three stars from Michelin in the two years of ratings.) “The people visiting are the same,” she says.

Six months after the Vancouver, BC, guide was published, Eater reported “a somewhat altered Vancouver dining scene has emerged from the fray with hiked prices and impossible-to-score reservations.”

Higher prices are about the last thing Seattle restaurants need. While restaurateurs are getting squeezed by rising food and labor costs, Seattle diners are frustrated by the costs of eating out in Seattle. Michelin stars are not some magic money minting system. A star won’t bring back tourism from Canada while the president is making threats; it won’t encourage visitors from Europe to risk getting thrown in detention. Our restaurant scene needs investment and help, but it needs to come from the bottom up.

The Michelin Guide began as a nineteenth-century marketing campaign to convince people to drive farther (and thus require more tires) for better meals. Over the last 136 years, its rankings have grown to near-ubiquity, with “Michelin-starred” practically a synonym for excellent fine-dining. But its rankings remain barely more relevant to the general population and overall restaurants than when it published for the 3,000 total motor vehicles in France in 1889.

I’ve written about how the rent is too damn high, so let’s figure out how we can help lower that cost for restaurants. We already have the bones of excellent programs, like Seattle Restored, which allows pop-ups to settle into a fixed location and is behind places like Lenox, Mixed Pantry, and Pan de la Selva’s new downtown café. Let’s look at the places that are finding success as the moment and find ways to replicate that: mentorship programs that imitate the informal one that allowed one of the city’s best restaurants, Pancita, to flourish; helping to double-utilize space, as Temple Pastries and Sacro Bosco do and Chamorikén and the Wash did; and help longtime community restaurants to get ownership of their buildings, as Thai Siam was eventually able to do, and as Irwin’s Bakery did earlier this year—both of which now get to continue their long legacy.

Our restaurant industry is struggling because middle-class wages lag behind the cost of living, and dining out is expensive here—which stifles creativity and forces restaurants to play it safe to survive. Paying for the Michelin Guide to come to Seattle is a 1-percent solution to a 99-percent problem, and hanging Michelin stars on Seattle restaurants will not change the fundamental economics at play. We can put that money where our mouths are, literally, and invest in our own restaurant scene.